South Africa’s real accountability test is local

Is it just me, or is there a particular tone to South African political exhaustion right now? It seems different from the rage and release of the nineties and noughties. And not quite the quiet resignation of the post-Jacob Zuma period either.

If anything, it’s giving a little meh, but everyone needs to believe in something, right? And a lot is riding on 2026.

The Steenhuisen thing

The framing seemed statesmanlike. On 4 February, DA leader John Steenhuisen announced he would not seek re-election at the party’s April congress. Mission accomplished; time to focus on the agriculture ministry. The fuller picture is a little messier. 

A default judgement over R150,000 in personal credit card debt, a bitter public feud with former finance chair Dion George, and widespread fury among farmers over his handling of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak had cornered him. So, party donors applied pressure. 

The Western Cape faction wanted him gone. Senior figures brokered what Daily Maverick called a “dignified exit.” Steenhuisen insists he wasn’t pushed. 

Whether you buy the spin or not, the outcome tells of something about South African democratic accountability in 2026. Even inside a party that prides itself on robust governance, institutional pressure forced a leadership change when optics fell short.

South Africa’s democratic accountability reached a turning point in 2024

Pressure, it turns out, is a consequential engine. 

The Government of National Unity (GNU), formed after the 2024 elections, reduced the African National Congress (ANC) below 50 percent for the first time in the post-apartheid era. 

And it does seem like the GNU is relieving us of at least some of the national constipation ANC dominance eventually produced.

Eskom recorded 273 consecutive days without load shedding as of mid-February 2026. Unplanned outages dropped by more than 5,000MW year-on-year. 

Diesel expenditure fell by R4.88 billion compared to the same period last year.

For context, these numbers deserve plain language. Two years ago, South Africans endured blackouts, some as long as ten hours, as routine. That’s a lot of good braai chops and milk going off unless you pray and plan, like, a lot.

The country’s productive capacity was bleeding out through Eskom’s failing turbines. 

This turnaround did not arrive through magic or sheer goodwill. We got there through multi-party pressure on a utility that single-party dominance had left to rot.

It’s not all wine and roses, though. The national job market showed a fragile recovery in 2025. The devastating “bloodbath” of 54,000 lost positions in Gauteng, however, reveals a deep structural rot in South Africa’s industrial heartland. It threatens to pull the economic engine into a tailspin.

Mexico tried to elect its way to judicial accountability

Sometimes it helps to look elsewhere. Just to see how others do complicated things. Mexico reveals what happens when a ruling party designs an accountability mechanism for itself.

In September 2024, outgoing president and Morena founder Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), pushed through a constitutional amendment requiring the popular election of every judge in the country, roughly 7,000 positions.

Morena, center-left to left-wing, is currently the largest political party in Mexico and Latin America, with over 11 million members as of 2026. AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, also with Morena, championed the reform as radical democracy.

The first round of judicial elections took place on 1 June 2025. Turnout was 13%, the lowest participation in any Mexican election since the multi-party era began. Sheinbaum’s approval rating is still above 70 percent, if you were wondering.

The judges who won the judicial elections read like a party roster. The new Judicial Discipline Tribunal, the body that decides which judges get removed, is a Morena super-majority. And because Mexican politics get messy quickly, twenty winning candidates have criminal records or links to drug trafficking defenses.

That was step one. Step two came in November 2024, when the government shut down INAI, Mexico’s independent transparency agency, and folded its powers into a new executive branch secretariat. The government now polices itself.

For what it’s worth, Sheinbaum’s administration claims that folding these powers into a new executive secretariat increase transparency and create a more direct, streamlined system for citizens to access information. We’ll see.

And yet

That 13% judicial vote turnout was not apathy. Civil associations organised a deliberate boycott, framing abstention as civil disobedience against a captured process. On election day, protesters marched from the Angel of Independence to the Monumento a la Revolucion, calling it “Black Sunday.”

When INAI fell, a coalition of civil society groups, journalists, and academics took the fight to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and launched the #LoQueDejamosDeSaber (What We Stopped Knowing) campaign to track what information the public was losing access to. They did not wait for a domestic court to save them.

And in the desert states where more than 100,000 people remain disappeared, mothers’ collectives like Una Promesa por Cumplir (A Promise to Fulfill) still conduct their own field searches in territory controlled by criminal organizations. 

Norma Andrade, who co-founded an organization tracking femicide victims in Ciudad Juarez after her daughter’s murder in 2001, has survived two assassination attempts. She kept working. 

Formal mechanism shifted. Civic infrastructure was rerouted.

That is the distinction South Africa needs to absorb before November. Elections produce conditions. They do not produce accountability by themselves. 

When a ruling party captures the oversight system, what survives is organized civic pressure that exists independent of any government structure, pressure that finds new channels when the old ones close.

The American stress test is procedural, slow, and functioning

The US model runs on a different engine: procedural friction. Courts, congressional oversight committees, freedom of information laws, and an adversarial press create a system designed to be maddening. It is also designed to survive, despite what we may think.

Through 2025 and into 2026, the second Trump administration tested that machinery at every joint. Executive orders on civil service reclassification and federal spending controls met sustained legal challenge. Courts strike down certain actions. Congressional committees continue to generate friction.

South Africa’s institutional architecture operates on similar principles, if with less depth. The Zondo Commission delivered one of the most exhaustive public records of political corruption any emerging democracy has produced. The National Prosecuting Authority, rebuilt after systematic hollowing during the Zuma years, moves slowly. But the machinery exists. The GNU’s coalition arithmetic adds a layer the US system lacks: cabinet members who answer to partners with the power to walk away.

How the 2026 municipal elections will test South Africa’s democratic accountability

National-level progress on energy stability and institutional reform is real. So is the gap between Pretoria and your ward councillor’s office. The Auditor-General’s most recent municipal audit cycle shows a stark, deepening divide between improving national-level metrics and a deteriorating, often dysfunctional, municipal landscape. 

As of February 2026, the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) has not signed off on the 2024/25 financial audits for nine municipalities, including the Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni metros, due to ongoing disputes. 

These delays raise significant concerns regarding transparency and governance, with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) warning that bonds could be suspended if submissions are not finalized by February 28, 2026

The 2026 municipal elections, scheduled between November 2026 and February 2027, will test whether voters transfer the accountability energy of 2024 to the local level. A total of 508 political parties have registered to contest. 

The SACP will run independently of the ANC for the first time. Analysts predict the ANC could drop to 30% in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. The competitive marketplace is wider than it has been in the democratic era.

South Africa’s democratic accountability depends on what happens at the ward level

Accountability at national level required South African voters to do something historic in 2024: strip a liberation movement of its majority. They did just that. 

The resultant GNU, for all its friction and fragility, has produced a cabinet where partners audit each other in real time. Steenhuisen’s choreographed departure, whatever the personal motivations, confirms that even within parties, political consequences now have teeth.

Municipal accountability, however, requires something different.

It needs 27.67 million registered voters to treat ward councillors with the same scrutiny they applied to the national ballot. 

It requires civic organisations to track procurement at the local level with the same tenacity Mexican forensic collectives bring to tracking disappeared students.

It calls for the kind of procedural grind that is supposed to keep American institutions functional even under extraordinary political stress.

The 2024 elections suggested that South African democracy is just fine, thanks for asking. 2026 will check the temperature on whether South Africans are willing to make it work where pipes are broken and streetlights are out.