South Africans tell survey their municipalities ignore them: 59% report bad service, 68% say complaints go unanswered
Almost 2,000 people across all nine provinces were polled on how local government actually works for them, and the answer is not well.
A survey of 1 986 people across all nine provinces has found that 59% report negative experiences of municipal services, 68% disagree that their municipality responds quickly to complaints, and 64% believe community input does not influence municipal planning decisions.
The Community Perceptions of Local Government Survey was published as an opinion piece in Sunday World on 1 November 2026, written by Dr Harlan Cloete, a research fellow in local governance and public leadership at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State and chief executive of the Athlone Institute in Paarl. Cloete writes that he approached colleagues at the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and the FW de Klerk Foundation, the Paarl community radio station KC 107.7 and Sunday World in May 2026 to run the study, with particular interest in the experiences of young people.
The work used the Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices framework, extended to include support for democracy. It asked what people know about local government, how they feel about democratic institutions, whether they take part in civic life and how they get their information. Cloete describes the preliminary findings as sobering but not surprising.
The numbers behind the headline dissatisfaction are worth setting out because they describe distinct problems rather than one mood. Negative attitudes towards democratic institutions were reported by 55% of respondents. Concern about the transparency of public spending was expressed by 66%. On the question of whether their voices count, 64% said community input did not shape municipal planning decisions, which is a specific complaint about the machinery of participation rather than a general grumble.
The survey lands in an election year. More than 136 000 candidates are contesting 10 526 council seats in the 2026 local government elections, and much of the public debate has centred on polling and on the coalitions expected to follow. Cloete’s argument is that the contest is not the whole story. The acid test of local democracy, he writes, is not only who wins an election but what happens between elections.
The age gap in registration is the finding most likely to shape how parties campaign. Among respondents aged 35 and older, 82% were registered to vote. Among those aged 18 to 24, the figure was 39%. The reasons given for not registering differed by age. Younger unregistered respondents more often cited not having enough information about voter registration. Older unregistered respondents more often reported political disinterest.
The survey also found a positive association between civic knowledge and participation. Respondents who knew more about how local government works tended to take part more actively, which points at the practical questions of municipal budgets, ward committees, integrated development planning and the mechanisms available to hold elected representatives to account.
On where people get their information, social media was the most frequently reported source at 68%, followed by friends and family at 41% and community radio at 36%. The survey found a positive association between community radio engagement and civic participation, though community radio engagement was not significantly associated with voter registration.
Cloete places the findings alongside Oxfam South Africa’s report, Hoarded Wealth, Dignity Denied: Confronting South Africa’s Extreme Wealth and Inequality Emergency, which argues that extreme inequality concerns not only the gap between rich and poor but the unequal distribution of wealth, opportunities and power, and warns that it can undermine participatory democracy when large sections of society feel excluded from economic progress and decision-making. His reading is that a municipality that does not answer complaints, or that plans without its residents, weakens participation in practice, particularly in communities where visible prosperity sits beside poverty.
He is careful about what local government can be asked to fix. Municipalities cannot resolve every structural inequality, he writes, but local government remains the sphere through which communities access basic services, shape development planning and hold public representatives accountable.
The findings are preliminary and Cloete says so. He and colleagues at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures at the University of the Free State are continuing an in-depth analysis of the data, looking at relationships between civic knowledge, democratic attitudes, participation, institutional trust and access to information across different communities and demographic groups. The survey is not presented as a verdict on local government but as an evidence base for further investigation and public debate.
Cloete’s book, 101 Local Governance Lessons: from the Great Governance ZA Podcast, was published by UJ Press in September 2026 and is available in open-access digital formats and in paperback.
