POLLS: One year later: South Africans see much improvement in local government performance in metro’s.

Aside from the metropolitan area of Cape Town and Buffalo City, South Africans have seen a marked improvement in the performance of local government.

South African voters went to the polls on 3 August 2016 to elect new local governments for the next five years.  Amongst the results of these elections was the move of control of three metropolitan areas – Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay –  from the ANC to the DA (together with their coalition partners and other co-operating parties)

‘In the 6-monthly Government Performance Barometer undertaken by Ipsos, questions are asked about the performance of local authorities as well as about the delivery of basic services” explains Mari Harris, Head of Public Affairs and Political Analyst at Ipsos.

The graph below illustrates the views of the residents of each of the eight metropolitan council areas in the country.  The question was: “How well do you think your local authority is doing their job? ,Is it very well, fairly well, not really well or not at all well?”

It is clear that the inhabitants of most of the metropolitan areas (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay, Ekurhuleni, and Ethekwini) think that their local authorities are now doing a better job than a year ago. In the case of Tshwane and Mangaung the rating of the local authorities stayed the same.

Buffalo City has shown a significant decline, suggesting that there might be a total breakdown between residents and their local government- which will possibly be made clearer in the next wave of research.

The four metropolitan areas controlled by the DA are the best performers overall, as rated by the residents. (The score for Nelson Mandela Bay improved 17 percentage points over the last year!)
However, the metropolitan councils of Mangaung and Ekurhuleni are not lagging far behind currently; and Ethekwini also showed a remarkable improvement of 15 percentage points over the last year.

“It is quite common for satisfaction scores to dip just before an election (July 2016) and then spike just after an election (Nov 2016) as can be seen in Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay and Ekurhuleni” says Harris. “Obviously, it is now imperative for the new councils to work to maintain and improve these opinions.”

Local authorities are mainly responsible for providing services to the people in the area they are responsible for. Therefore, the question was asked “How well would you say your local government is handling the delivery of basic services, such and water and electricity, is this very well, fairly well, not really well or not at all well?”

Ekurhuleni residents rate their local authority consistently high for service delivery. In fact, Ekurhuleni outperforms all the other metropolitan authorities by a large margin on this issue.
The scores for Tshwane and Johannesburg show a steady improvement, especially since the end of last year. Scores in Mangaung and Cape Town are slowly slipping, while Ethekwini, Nelson Mandela Bay and Buffalo City can surely all improve. (Ethekwini is already doing a lot better than during the previous measurement in November 2016.)