MK Party takes potholes, blackouts and joblessness to the voters

The MK Party has put potholed roads, unemployment and missing electricity at the centre of its pitch to voters, saying the struggles are the same across South African communities and that municipalities must be made to work for the people.

In a post to its followers on X on Tuesday, the party said councils should be creating opportunities and building better communities, and urged residents to “choose change and demand service delivery”.

The message is a familiar one in South African politics, where the condition of local government is felt most directly at street level: the road that is not repaired, the substation that fails, the job that does not come. The party’s post names all three together and addresses them to residents rather than to any particular municipality.

It does not identify a specific town, ward or council, and it gives no figures for unemployment, outages or road conditions. What it does is set out the case the party intends to make, that municipal government is failing the people who live under it and that the answer is a change at the ballot box.

The post carries the party’s election hashtag and a link to its campaign material, placing the appeal in the run-up to voting rather than in any current council dispute. No ward, project or budget is named.

The Enquirer has no record of a response from any municipality or from the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs to the party’s claims, and none is quoted here.

What the post leaves unanswered is the detail a voter would need to judge it: which municipalities the party is measuring, what it would do differently in office, and where the money would come from. Those questions are not addressed in the material the party published.