South Africans head to the polls on 4 November to elect the councillors who will govern their municipalities. The vote arrives against a backdrop of quiet withdrawal. Across the country, households have learned to route around failing public services rather than demand their repair, and the consequences of that retreat now reach far beyond any single family’s walls.
The pattern is familiar. When public healthcare falters, those who can afford it buy medical aid. When schools decline, children are moved to private institutions. Rising crime is met with private security and higher walls, power cuts with rooftop solar, and dry taps with boreholes and storage tanks. Protecting one’s family in these conditions is understandable and often costly. The trouble, as commentator Lutic Mosoane argues in a recent SABC News analysis (https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/we-cannot-keep-buying-our-way-out-of-a-broken-south-africa/), is that many citizens have begun confusing their ability to survive a broken system with evidence that the system still works.
For the millions who cannot buy their way out, there is no such escape. Mosoane, who grew up in a rural community where private alternatives were never available to everyone, points to what happens when water stops flowing there: families cannot simply call a private supplier or drill a borehole. A mother who spends hours searching for water is not dealing with a minor inconvenience but carrying a burden that functioning public institutions should have lifted from her. Her crisis, he notes, long predates the moment suburban households began experiencing similar failures.
The numbers behind this picture are stark. Statistics South Africa reports that only 15.5% of individuals had medical aid coverage in 2025. By the second quarter of 2026, unemployment had reached 33.6%, leaving roughly 8.5 million people without work. Eighty20’s latest credit stress report found that 41.8% of credit-active South Africans were at least three months behind on one or more loans. Taken together, these figures expose the limits of an arrangement in which households are increasingly expected to finance privately what public institutions should provide.
The institutions themselves are struggling to account for the money they do spend. The Auditor-General’s 2024/25 report found that only 39 of the country’s 257 municipalities achieved clean audits, down from 41 the previous year, and none of the eight metropolitan municipalities managed a clean audit. Those 39 municipalities accounted for just 8% of local government expenditure. Mosoane, a Chartered Global Management Accountant who has worked with public institutions, cautions that a non-clean audit does not automatically mean money was stolen, nor does a clean audit guarantee that services reached every household. What the findings demand, he argues, is serious scrutiny of how public resources are managed and whether spending produces meaningful results. He has seen institutions strengthen controls and improve outcomes, which suggests improvement is possible, but behind neglected controls and unresolved findings stand public resources, unfulfilled commitments and communities still waiting for services.
The deeper cost of private escape routes is not only financial. With every institution abandoned without demanding its restoration, the country edges toward accepting that public services are for those who cannot afford anything better. Inequality then stops being a mere difference in income and begins to shape whose dignity deserves protection and whose suffering can be ignored.
Private solutions, meanwhile, have hard limits. No amount of private security produces a safe society. No collection of rooftop solar panels substitutes for a reliable national electricity system. No household water tank replaces properly managed municipal infrastructure. Citizens may purchase temporary distance from dysfunction, but not permanent immunity from its consequences.
Mosoane’s argument is that the response must be bigger than anger and must outlast election day. Voting matters, but so does reading municipal reports, attending ward meetings, questioning poor expenditure and insisting on competent, ethical public administration. Businesses and professionals, he adds, cannot divorce their success from the wellbeing of the communities in which they operate. Caring about the quality of the public school attended by the child of the person who cleans one’s home, he writes, is not a matter of guilt but of recognizing that another person’s dignity does not become irrelevant when their circumstances differ.
The Constitution calls for accountable local government and sustainable service provision, and those commitments must be visible in people’s lives. There is a difference, Mosoane concludes, between building a better life for oneself and building a better society. The first demands effort and discipline; the second demands justice, functioning institutions and a willingness to look beyond one’s own gates. A country cannot develop sustainably on the assumption that every household must become its own water supplier, electricity provider, security company and social safety net. That is not progress. It is a warning. Justice neglected does not disappear; it accumulates, and sooner or later the bill comes due for everyone.