Durban ratepayers pay for councillors who cannot read the reports they vote on

Durban residents who have spent years watching council decisions stall, budgets fail to translate into services and accountability evaporate now have a name for the problem from someone inside the system. ActionSA’s mayoral candidate for eThekwini, Zwakele Mncwango, says most councillors in KwaZulu-Natal cannot read for meaning, and that the people elected to hold municipal officials to account instead depend on those same officials to explain what they are voting on.

Mncwango made the claim in an interview with The Citizen published on 21 October 2026, speaking in Durban ahead of the local government elections. As The Citizen reported, he said some councillors rely on officials’ knowledge to navigate council decisions and reports, and that the difficulty is that councillors are the ones expected to hold those officials accountable.

For anyone who has queued at an eThekwini rates hall, waited on a stalled housing project or watched a ward committee go quiet, the claim lands on familiar ground. The council that sets rates, approves the budget and signs off on service delivery is only as sharp as the people in the seats. Mncwango’s argument is that the sharpness is missing, and that the officials who should be answering to the council are the ones briefing it.

He went further on the speeches. Most mayors do not read their own, he said, and someone writes them. The budget is done by officials, which he said is acceptable in itself. His objection is that councillors are not part of the process. “I am not saying councillors must sit and do the numbers,” he said. “All I am saying is that councillors must be part of the process.”

Mncwango rejected the historical excuse. In the early 2000s, he said, there was an argument that the country had just come out of apartheid and people had been denied opportunity. That argument, in his words, cannot be made now, 30 years into democracy. The South African Local Government Association provides training, he said, and councillors have the chance to study. “There is no reason why a councillor who has been a councillor for more than three terms can’t have a degree,” he said. “There is no reason.”

He described the mechanics of a council meeting in terms that will be recognisable to anyone who has sat in one. The agenda arrives sealed and is delivered to a councillor’s home, so reading it means opening the cover. Some bring it sealed to council. Some open it in the chamber.

The remedy he proposes is a means test for candidates, and political parties improving how they nominate councillors so that the right people are elected. He also turned the question back on voters. Clean governance is not something that is accepted or understood well by communities, he said, which is why someone clouded by corruption can be popular and still be elected.

That last point is the uncomfortable one, and it is the one that connects the claim to the people who carry the cost. The resident who votes for a familiar name and then waits three years for a pipe to be repaired is part of the chain Mncwango describes. So is the party that puts a loyalist on the list. So is the councillor who never opens the agenda.

What the interview does not do is name a municipality, a council or a single councillor. The claim is broad, delivered by a candidate in a campaign, and it rests on his own experience rather than on a published audit, a qualification register or a study of literacy among councillors. Readers should weigh it as the assessment of a politician asking for their vote, not as a finding. The Enquirer has not independently verified it and the material does not carry a response from the affected councils, from Salga or from any party whose councillors are implicated.

What can be said is that the question he raises is checkable. Municipal councils publish their agendas and minutes. Salga runs the training he mentions. The qualifications of councillors are a matter of public record, and the local government elections will put every ward on the ballot. Voters in eThekwini and across KwaZulu-Natal who have been told for years that the problem sits with officials now have a candidate’s claim to test against the record of the people asking for their cross.