South Africa is preparing for the 2026 local government elections on 4 November. In this moment, one thing is clear: the Electoral Commission is not administering elections as if citizens still live in a paper-only democracy. The IEC is expanding online registration, mobile tools, WhatsApp support, a multilingual contact centre, AI-assisted voter information, media resources and the Atlas of Results. A voter can check registration details, update an address, find a voting station and access election information with far more ease than before.

That should be welcomed. A modern democracy must make it easier, not harder, for citizens to participate. But once a citizen has voted for a municipal council, the picture changes. The same person who can access election information on a phone may struggle to find out whether a municipality is meeting service-delivery targets, repairing infrastructure, spending according to budget, responding to complaints or fixing audit findings. So, South Africa is modernising the act of voting faster than it is modernising the act of holding municipalities to account.

What Has The IEC Shown Us?

The IEC’s modernisation matters because it treats voters as citizens with a right to accessible information. Its tools are not merely about convenience. They are about trust. They show that public institutions can use technology to communicate clearly, reduce confusion and make democratic participation easier.

This is not a small point. Local government elections require people to know where they are registered, where they must vote and how their vote fits into ward and proportional representation systems. In local elections, mistakes around registration and voting districts can directly affect whether a person is able to vote where they live. The IEC’s approach recognises this reality. It gives citizens several ways to check, ask, confirm and act.

Now, the same standard must apply after the election. If citizens deserve clear information before they vote, they deserve clear information after they vote. Democracy cannot be modern at the ballot and opaque after the ballot.

What Happens After The Vote?

This is where the municipal accountability gap becomes serious. The Auditor-General’s latest local government outcomes show that only 39 municipalities, or 15%, achieved clean audits in 2024/25. Even more concerning, 123 municipalities had material findings on the usefulness and reliability of information in their performance reports. Without audit corrections, only 27% of performance reports would have been useful and reliable for oversight.

In plain language, this means that many municipalities are not giving councils, residents or oversight bodies a trustworthy picture of what is being delivered. A performance report should tell the public whether the municipality did what it promised to do. It should show whether roads were repaired, water projects progressed, waste was collected, budgets were followed and failures were corrected. If that information is unreliable, accountability becomes guesswork.

Still, the issue is not that municipalities have no reporting duties. They do. The Constitution requires local government to provide democratic and accountable government for local communities. It requires public administration to be accountable, responsive and transparent through timely, accessible and accurate information. The Municipal Systems Act of 2000 and the Municipal Finance Management Act of 2003 also require municipalities to report on performance, finances and corrective action.

The problem, therefore, is not a lack of principles. The problem is that too many of these principles do not reach ordinary residents in a simple, useful and timely way.

Why Should This Matter To Ordinary Residents?

Because municipal accountability is not an abstract legal concern. It is about the streetlight that stays broken, the water outage that is never explained, the pothole that grows for months, the refuse that is not collected and the complaint that disappears into a system without a reference number or a response.

When information is late, confusing or unreliable, residents cannot tell whether failure is caused by lack of money, poor planning, weak management, corruption, contractor delays or political neglect. And when citizens cannot see the cause of failure, they cannot properly demand a remedy.

This is also why the FW de Klerk Foundation released its digital local government election handbook, Whose Responsibility Is It Anyway? The purpose of that guide is to help South Africans understand what local government is responsible for, why local elections matter and how citizens can participate more meaningfully. But citizen education must be matched by government transparency. It is not enough to tell people to participate if the system does not give them usable information.

What Should Change Before 4 November?

Every party and independent candidate asking for municipal power should commit to a simple standard: make municipal performance visible to the public throughout the term, not only during campaigns and not only in technical reports.

Municipalities should publish citizen-friendly quarterly scorecards showing service-delivery targets, budget performance, infrastructure projects, complaints received and resolved, procurement information and progress on audit action plans. These should be available online, but also through ward offices, libraries, community halls and public meetings for residents who are not digitally connected.

South Africa should also move towards standard municipal dashboards. Not every municipality has the same capacity, but the public should not need to be an auditor, lawyer or municipal finance specialist to understand whether a council is doing its job. A resident should be able to see, in simple terms, what was promised, what was delivered, what failed and what is being done about it.

The state already knows this. The reviewed draft White Paper on Local Government recognises that municipal digital transformation is fragmented and uneven. It calls for greater transparency, open data and dashboard standards. That is the right direction. The test now is whether these ideas become visible in the everyday life of residents.

Local government is the sphere closest to the people. It is where constitutional promises are either felt or betrayed. If South Africa can build modern tools to help citizens register, vote and follow election results, it can build modern tools to help them monitor the councils they elect.

The 2026 local government elections should therefore not only ask citizens to get up, show up and vote. They should ask municipalities to open up, report back and account.

For more on this topic read: THE YOUTH HAVE REGISTERED. NOW GIVE THEM A REASON TO VOTE – https://fwdeklerk.org/the-youth-have-registered-now-give-them-a-reason-to-vote/