The DA launched its local government election manifesto on Saturday, promising to rescue South Africa’s collapsing municipalities by bringing in the private sector.
DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis says private companies will help municipalities provide water, electricity and waste services through transparent tender processes in municipalities the DA wins after the November 4 elections.
The party promises public-private partnerships, professionally managed utilities and performance-based contracts, with private companies financing, building, operating and maintaining water, electricity and waste infrastructure.
It sounds modern and business-friendly. It also sounds remarkably similar to what the ANC has been promising and not implementing.
The ANC’s 2026 manifesto had not been published when the DA launched its own, but its 2021 manifesto promised professional municipalities, reliable services and partnerships with business. Operation Vulindlela, the government’s reform programme, is already promoting professionally managed utilities, private-sector participation and ring-fenced municipal trading revenue.
The DA is therefore not proposing a radically different municipal economic model. It is offering the same instruments – private operators, tenders, ring-fenced income, outside expertise – with a promise that it will administer them more honestly.
In other words, the DA is offering the same plumbing with a different plumber.
That does not make it a bad policy. Most of South Africa’s municipalities need more capital and technical expertise than they have at present: water systems are leaking, electricity networks are failing and sewage plants are collapsing, after years of cadre deployment and the exit of experienced engineers. The question is whether private participation helps municipalities regain capacity, or makes them permanently dependent on contractors.
The DA is not opposed to tenders; no governing party can be. The constitution requires state procurement to be fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective.
Critics say the DA seeks to replace black tenderpreneurs with white companies. The party is campaigning against race-based procurement, proposing a model based on economic disadvantage, job creation and value for money instead. It does not say tenders should go to white companies – but in an economy where capital and technical capacity remain disproportionately white-owned, dropping race-conscious preferences could redirect municipal spending that way while being presented as colour-blind professionalism.
A DA council cannot simply rewrite national law. Until BEE legislation changes, through amendment or court challenge, its procurement remains bound by the constitution, procurement law and the Municipal Finance Management Act.
What the DA says it opposes is tenderpreneurship: inflated contracts for political allies, specifications written for preferred bidders and payment for work never completed. Its manifesto promises to publish tender awards, contract prices and premiums paid above the lowest qualifying bid, alongside strict performance agreements.
These are welcome commitments. But transparency alone does not make a contract affordable or a contractor competent.
Look at Joburg. The city already relies heavily on private companies, yet its infrastructure keeps deteriorating. Johannesburg Water awarded a R263m contract to two little-known companies to supply 70 water tankers; an amaBhungane investigation raised questions about the bidders’ addresses and price comparisons, and the high court declared the tender invalid – a ruling Johannesburg Water is appealing.
The tanker economy shows the danger of outsourcing municipal failure. When companies earn millions delivering emergency water, broken pipes and empty reservoirs become commercially valuable; the contractor profits because the system does not work. Failure becomes a business model.
This is the central weakness in the DA’s manifesto: promising a partnership with the private sector is easy; ensuring that the municipality, and the resident, gets value for money is much harder.
A genuine partnership transfers real financial and operational risk to the private company, which should be paid for outcomes, not for supplying equipment, personnel or hours. A badly constructed one is merely a bigger, longer tender; it can lock a municipality into inflated prices and dependence on a monopoly provider for decades.
The DA’s pre-approved supplier panels also deserve scrutiny. They can cut delays by letting municipalities pick from a vetted list, but can also restrict competition and create a protected circle of repeat winners. A panel is not an anticorruption mechanism; it is only as clean as the officials who run it.
Hill-Lewis’s immediate challenge is Gauteng, where the DA wants to take Joburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. In Joburg, Helen Zille promises to end waste and rebuild infrastructure; in Tshwane, Cilliers Brink is campaigning on clean government and reliable water; in Ekurhuleni, Khathutshelo Rasilingwane has flagged billing and merit-based appointments. All three promise the same fix: stabilise finances, ring-fence utility income, repair infrastructure and bring in private capital where needed.
The DA’s difficulty is that it has governed all three metros before, usually in fragile coalitions, leading Tshwane for much of the period after 2016, and running unstable administrations in Joburg and Ekurhuleni after 2021. Coalition chaos disrupted those governments, but the DA must explain why its earlier terms left them no more resilient to leadership change, and how its new partnerships differ from the outsourcing already consuming municipal budgets.
The government of national unity is blurring ideological lines between the DA and the ANC. The ANC has moved towards private power generation and private investment in rail, ports and water infrastructure; the DA, with which it now shares national power, is embracing similar partnerships at municipal level. That does not necessarily mean the DA is falling for ANC policies; it may show both parties have accepted the scale of the crisis and arrived at the same limited range of solutions.
The real contest may not be between public provision and privatisation – it will be a contest over credibility. The ANC says it can renew itself and finally implement reforms promised for years; the DA says the same tools will work in cleaner, more capable hands.
That is a persuasive offer. But if the DA cannot stop its private partners from becoming the next tanker barons and tender millionaires, its municipal rescue plan will reproduce the system it claims to have come to replace.
Catch more viewpoints of Majova, political editor at Scrolla.Africa, a mobile-first news site covering breaking stories fast from communities across South Africa in English and isiZulu
