Fixing local politics starts inside South Africa’s political parties:
On 14 September, President Cyril Ramaphosa called for greater accountability in local government. He emphasised the need for a stricter vetting process for ANC councillors and stronger performance management.
His remarks were met with mixed reactions. Some welcomed the call from the president while others dismissed it as “election-talk” with the president having no intention of making this actionable.
Such scepticism reflects a wider crisis of mistrust in local government across South Africa.
In Afrobarometer’s Round 9 survey 45% of respondents indicated that they did not trust their local government council at all.
Similarly, 64% of respondents disapproved of the way local councillors have performed in the past year.
These figures represent the need for greater accountability.
However, the discourse is often orientated around citizen-led accountability while not enough is said about how to strengthen intra-party accountability, especially given our electoral system of proportional representation.
Party politics make up a key component of South Africa’s democracy. Not only do political parties hold considerable power at a national level, such as their responsibility to choose the president, but also at a local level, where they play a pivotal role in the governance of municipalities.
This is due to the fact that most voters choose a political party rather than individual representatives (though they now have the option of the latter, a very recent feature). Functionally, then, accountability is derived directly from the parties themselves, as opposed to citizens.
This is not to say that citizens don’t play a key role, but parties can get away with a lot if there is no internal accountability.
Such accountability is important for ensuring trust between citizens and the government, especially at a local level.
However, when parties fail to hold members and leaders accountable it deepens people’s mistrust.
Effectively, if a political party cannot hold its own leaders accountable, how can it be entrusted with representing people and communities?
Over the past decade, the importance of intra-party accountability has grown increasingly; coalitions have become a key feature of the political landscape. Coalitions require trust among parties.
If a political party does not have strong internal accountability mechanisms, it can undermine its credibility and trustworthiness to uphold the coalition agreement which, ultimately, leads to instability in the council.
Last, intra-party accountability is important to ensure that citizens remain the centre of South African politics.
It goes without saying that if there is no or little internal party accountability, power can be abused for
the benefit of a few, turning politics into a game of factional battles and party loyalty above representing and leading people.
Despite parties’ central responsibility towards South Africa’s democracy, the lack of intra-party accountability has undermined this crucial function. This has led to a wide range of issues, from corruption to racism, all of which continue to hinder the ability of municipalities to deliver services to South Africans.
This raises the question as to why intra-party accountability is so weak, despite it being a key part of the formal governance system in South Africa, especially at a local level.
At its core, there are three underlying issues that experts have identified: centralised power of political elites, patronage networks and poor internal democratic mechanisms.
In terms of centralised power structures, candidate selection remains top-down and political elites within the party have stronger control over who becomes a councillor than the local community.
There have been attempts to balance this by incorporating elements of a constituency-based system, however even in those cases, ward councillors tend to be more dependent on the favour of the party leaders than the people within that ward.
Ordinary members also tend to have limited influence as lists are closed — even if you are a member of a party, you don’t have as much control over who represents the party within the council.
Such a system tends to favour party loyalty over performance, as members who are fiercely loyal are protected by the party in turn.
The result is councillors who have no incentive to put the community first as their first interest is in protecting allies, who will in turn ensure their position within the party.
This is exacerbated by patronage networks and factionalism. Councillors often act as middle-men to resources, jobs and contracts. Being embedded in these networks makes it difficult to hold them accountable, as it could expose corruption or undermine the party position.
These councillors consequently get away with poor performance, as holding them accountable can be costly for the party.
Last, there is a lack of internal democratic processes, which undermines accountability. This is because systems that promote transparency, such as internal and branch elections, are often marred by internal politics and gatekeeping.
Instead of creating a culture of broad-based participation, internal processes become reduced to sites of exclusion. This lack of transparency and fairness undermines the party members and communities as power is derived internally rather than through community service.
Weak democratic processes within parties thus creates a disconnect between councillors and their communities.
These factors have contributed to the weak intra-party accountability which most South Africans are familiar with today. Some experts have used this to make a case for reforming the electoral system, focusing on more direct forms of accountability.
However, such measures take years to come to fruition and, withnext year’s local elections looming, we are unlikely to see much change until at least 2030.
How then can these issues be addressed to ensure that there is greater accountability, especially outside of the legislature?
One approach is to reform candidate selection so that it is more representative of the community that councillors are meant to represent. This would create greater accountability between elected officials and citizens and also build trust between citizens and political parties.
Political parties in Kenya, for instance, have primaries where citizens vote for who they want as their candidates to represent them.
Such an approach could work well in South Africa, especially in choosing ward candidates. This would allow communities to play a greater role in selecting candidates and ensuring that they are the best fit for their communities.
It would also mean ward councillors are more accountable to citizens themselves and not simply loyal to their respective political parties.
Another solution would be to introduce deliberative forums where grassroots members and community leaders engage with councillors and political parties.
These meetings could include social audits whereby citizens score their councillors on issues like service delivery, attendance and responsiveness. Such scores could be presented to councillors and political parties to encourage accountability more directly.
There are a number of examples where these initiatives have been implemented with varying degrees of success. For example, in India’s Madhya Pradesh state, regular social audits are held in which communities are able to provide feedback on local government performance and hold it accountable.
Finally, there needs to be a shift in attitude within party structures. One way to accomplish this is by emphasising ethics and leadership training for party candidates. While some have questioned the effectiveness of education, having leaders that are trained to be accountable and ethical plays a key role in ensuring there is greater party accountability.
Creating such modules in party training workshops would go a long way towards creating more accountable councillors who reflect the core values of the constitution.
Intra-party accountability is vital for good governance. Not only does it promote greater citizen participation and trust but directly ensures the delivery of services.
For the past few years, accountability has been put solely on the shoulders of citizens, grassroots movements and civil society. It is time for political parties to step up and do better for South Africa.
Stuart Morrison is a data analyst at Good Governance Africa.
Robert Mugabe’s children navigate life without first family privilege:
Irresponsible sex, betrayal, drugs, alcohol, failed marriage, short temper, violence, arrogance and a “do you know who I am” attitude summarise the lives of late Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe’s children.
The fall of Mugabe in November 2017 and his eventual death in September two years later had a direct and negative impact on his then relatively young children. Six years after his death, the reality of navigating life without Mugabe’s philosophical approach or first family privileges that could literally let his kids get away with murder is still hitting hard.
Bona Mugabe, aged 37, Robert Jr, 33, Chatunga, 29, and their older stepbrother Russell Goreraza, 41, are now just rich kids from next door with everyday struggles.
Robert Jr has earned a reputation for being unpredictable and uncontrollable. Last week, he was arrested for drug possession while speeding through traffic at high speed in the busiest section of Harare’s central business district.
He is out on $ 300 bail and due back in court on 22 October to answer to charges of the unlawful possession of two grams of marijuana. The state will seek to link Mugabe to a network of alleged drug dealers in Harare; he’s accused of peddling.
In February 2023, Mugabe Jr appeared in court facing charges of malicious property damage. The state said one morning, Mugabe Jr accused his friend’s gardener of urinating on the wheels of his car, leading to a heated argument.
The gardener fled from the scene, following which Mugabe Jr smashed the windshields of two Mercedes-Benz cars parked in the yard of his friend Sindiso Nkathazo. He also went inside the house to destroy electric gadgets such as televisions. The damage was estimated at $ 12 000.
Although being around the children of Zimbabwe’s ruling aristocracy is valued social capital in some circles, some of Robert Jr’s friends have told of abuse at his hands.
In December last year, one former friend posted on social media how the younger Mugabe had beaten up a friend with a beer bottle, landing him in hospital.
The friend shared a video of the beating and another one where Robert Jr was seen tampering with the victim’s intravenous drip during a visit to the hospital.
The friend wasn’t done. He also leaked a sex tape of Robert Jr and posted afterwards that, “I went to jail because of you!!! And now you’re attacking my family; come on, how ruthless!”
In May 2022, Robert Jr was admitted to a hospital in Singapore after his right lung collapsed during a visit there. In September 2023, he narrowly escaped death when his Range Rover Vogue crashed in Inyanga, a resort town in Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands.
Unlike his father, he’s not a political animal. He only featured once to endorse President Emmerson Mnangagwa at a rally of the ruling Zanu-PF party ahead of the 2023 general elections. His words were simple: “I am a Zanu-PF child.”
His young brother Chatunga, the spitting image of their father, is another short-tempered Mugabe.
“That one is like his father. He stands by what he believes in. We have failed to have him attend our functions and rallies. He’s his father’s child in every sense,” a Zanu-PF politburo member told the Mail and Guardian.
Chatunga was unhappy about how his father lost power to Mnangagwa and as a result openly endorsed opposition leader Nelson Chamisa ahead of the last elections.
Chatunga has also had his own share of run-ins with the law.
In September, while being chauffeured from the town of Beitbridge to the capital, Harare, by a Chinese national, he lost his composure at a police roadblock when asked for documents for the car they were travelling in.
According to court papers, Chatunga allegedly brandished a pocket knife at the policeman and barked, “Do you know who I am?” He’s out on free bail, and the matter is pending.
Before that, Chatunga, along with his two bodyguards, Peter Fredson and Tinashe Mupawo, faced five counts of assault in a dispute with miners who invaded his mother, Grace Mugabe’s Ion Mask farm in Mazowe.
The court heard how Chatunga and his guards tortured their victims using wooden logs and an iron bar. They are out on $ 200 bail each.
In 2014, Mugabe’s daughter Bona married Simba Chikore, who had previously flown her father on Air Zimbabwe. They have three children, but the marriage broke down in 2023, with Bona citing “irreconcilable differences” in divorce papers.
Chikore refused to walk away from the marriage empty-handed and is demanding a share of Bona’s wealth, which includes a real estate portfolio that covers farms worth at least $ 80 million, a $ 800 000 Rolls-Royce and numerous other luxury cars, and as a mansion in Dubai.
In his papers, Chikore said he wanted part of the wealth “acquired solely and jointly during their marriage through inheritance and donations”.
Bona hit back, saying “there was never a marriage” in the first place, arguing that when she married Chikore, he was already legally married to an American woman, Margaret Jeanine Brooks — something he kept secret — in violation of the Marriage Act. She argues he should not get a cent from her.
Mugabe’s widow, Grace, lives a private life away from the power and politics she once enjoyed as first lady. Snippets of her life are shown when she makes an appearance on special occasions.
In August, she turned 60, marking it with a lavish, exclusive birthday party attended by her closest friends and former political associates at the palatial Mugabe home, the Blue Roof, in one of Harare’s — and Zimbabwe’s — most affluent suburbs, Borrowdale.
A Corruption Truth and Reconciliation Commission is needed for a national reset:
In 2018, I shared an idea with a few friends and colleagues. To deal with systemic corruption, in the context of weakened state capacity and a dangerous shift of national attention away from development towards outrage about crime and corruption, a truth and amnesty process — a truth and reconciliation-type intervention — might be a viable option.
The reaction was sharp. Some colleagues, like Dumisani Hlophe-Tembe, objected strongly, believing it would grant a free pass to people who should face the long arm of the law.
Others were more measured. Advocate Vasu Gounden, a senior expert on global governance and conflict-resolution from the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (Accord), suggested a more scientific approach. He shared comparative case studies of corruption amnesty experiments from different countries.
At the time, the idea seemed provocative, even reckless. But given the ongoing national spectacle, with cycles of commissions, prosecutions and exposures that fail to deliver closure, I have returned to that idea, this time with the benefit of historical evidence, comparative analysis and theoretical reflection. South Africa has not ignored corruption. On the contrary, it has tried a multitude of interventions. The Scorpions once embodied a bold prosecutorial strike force. They were disbanded in a storm of political contestation. Their successor, the Hawks, inherited neither their independence nor effectiveness and became entangled in the politics they were meant to police.
The investigative directorate in the National Prosecuting Authority, created to pursue corruption and state capture cases, has struggled with insufficient resources and cases that are too complex, involving procurement webs, international networks and forensic evidence that are beyond its capacity. It has now been implicated in the Madlanga commission.
Once shackled to presidential proclamations and sealed reports, the Special Investigating Unit has greater scope to act proactively.
Yet, even in its strengthened form, it can only remove ill-gotten assets through forfeiture. Prosecution remains outside its mandate, requiring referral to an already overburdened NPA and the court system. The result is paradoxical. Wrongdoers can be stripped of wealth, yet avoid legal sanction. The auditor-general has gained new legal powers to escalate “material irregularities” and issue binding notices. Yet enforcement is weak because of scale. Findings accumulate, reports pile up, but the conversion of irregularities into criminal sanctions is slow.
Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts hearings are another example. They expose, dramatise and even embarrass, but do not close the loop. Offenders face ridicule on live television yet walk away without consequence. The committee is accountability as theatre. The Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture was monumental. It traced the architecture of corruption with unprecedented clarity, named names, wrote thousands of pages and handed over recommendations. Yet the commission itself, like all others, had no enforcement power.
The Madlanga commission is now on show, a national dialogue on the orgy of entanglements between politicians and criminal syndicates. Judging by the commentary from members of the public, commissions of enquiry have become a ritual substitute for accountability.
The result is a pattern. South Africa has perfected the art of exposure without closure. Evidence accumulates. Hearings multiply. Reports stack up. Yet prosecutions are slow, sanctions rare, deterrence absent. Exposure has become ritualised; an end rather than a means to justice.
This ritualism cannot be understood without history. A book titled Apartheid Grand Corruption, 1976–1994, by the Institute for Security Studies, shows how, by the 1990s, the apartheid state had become criminalised. Corruption was not an aberration. It was woven into governance. Laws were designed to facilitate graft.Authoritarian secrecy shielded private deals. Those who profited under apartheid were not swept away by democracy. Many transitioned seamlessly into the new order, negotiating their survival and embedding themselves in the networks of the democratic state. They carried forward practices of secrecy, profiteering and collusion. Some are respected business tycoons today.
The new state inherited legal frameworks designed to conceal. It took years to dismantle the structures that enabled corruption. The myth that corruption was born with democracy collapses under scrutiny. Corruption was already embedded in apartheid, only less visible. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the 1990s dealt with political violence but left economic crimes untouched. The networks of profiteering were never subjected to truth-telling or restitution. This absence has haunted the democratic era. A Corruption TRC, as I propose it, today could provide the historical closure that was denied then, by linking past and present, apartheid corruption and state capture, into a single reckoning.
This proposal does not seek to undermine other government measures. It aims to add a dimension that makes it possible to combat corruption quickly so that South Africa can focus on growth and on dealing with crime and poverty. International cases show the risks and possibilities. Tunisia’s Arbitration and Reconciliation Law of 2017 allowed officials and business elites to halt prosecutions if they returned some stolen funds. It was justified as an economic necessity.
Yet loopholes allowed concealment and public anger followed. This was exposure without closure. Hong Kong in the 1970s presents the opposite. The governor declared a partial amnesty when the Independent Commission Against Corruption was created. Lesser cases before 1977 were pardoned and severe cases were prosecuted. This created closure while preserving deterrence. Freed from endless retrospective prosecutions, the commission focused on reform. Within a decade, Hong Kong shifted from one of the most corrupt cities in Asia to one of the cleanest.
Moldova in 2016 shows how amnesty can collapse into impunity. Draft laws to legalise illicit wealth with a token fee to the state would have blocked scrutiny of officials’ assets. Public protest forced withdrawal. Brazil has repeatedly attempted electoral amnesties for politicians implicated in campaign finance crimes. These proposals were self-serving and met with public fury. By contrast, Singapore and China pursued a punitive path. Singapore coupled rapid economic reform with draconian punishment for corruption, including prison sentences and loss of all assets. China went further, making corruption at the highest level punishable by death. In the Philippines, former president Rodrigo Duterte authorised a drug war “death squad”, illustrating how some states resort to extrajudicial measures in the name of deterrence.
These Asian models created fear and deterrence, though at a heavy moral dilemma — if one applies a liberal lens. Yet they showcase a spectrum of options, from restorative models to punitive extremes. South Africa’s own TRC pioneered the idea of restorative justice. Offenders were required to confess fully to qualify for amnesty.
Victims were given recognition, the truth was established and a historical record was created. Punishment was not abandoned, but it was redefined to include the restoration of dignity, acknowledgement of harm and the conditions of exclusion from public life. Now, the failure to prosecute those who did not get amnesty is a subject of yet another commission of enquiry.
A Corruption TRC would adopt this logic. It is not about free passes. It is about speed, structured consequences and closure. Those who confess would lose illicit wealth, properties and privileges. They would face exclusion from public office. They would be required to step down from penthouses into ordinary life. This is not impunity; it is accountability by other means. But there would also be hard edges. Those who conceal, lie and fail to confess would face the harshest penalties — life imprisonment for major offenders, full prosecution for architects of state capture, the seizure of all assets.
The Corruption TRC would thus create a sharp line between honesty and dishonesty, between confession and concealment. The idea of a Corruption TRC draws from transitional justice. In post-authoritarian societies, truth commissions were created not because ordinary courts were abandoned but because they were overwhelmed.
Systemic wrongs could not be prosecuted one by one. Conditional amnesty offered a different bargain — confession and truth in exchange for protection from punishment. This logic can apply to corruption when it reaches systemic levels. Institutional economics reinforces this view.
Corruption creates perverse equilibria. Everyone participates; no one can withdraw unilaterally. In such an equilibrium, gradual reform is too weak. A systemic shock is needed.
A Corruption TRC can act as that shock. It can reset the equilibrium by forcing disclosure, removing illicit gains and excluding corrupt actors from public office. State capacity theory adds a third dimension. Institutions built to prosecute isolated crimes cannot cope when the system is compromised. They fragment cases across agencies, create bottlenecks and slow enforcement. The gap between exposure and closure widens. A TRC, by contrast, centralises the process, creates speed and resolves the backlog.
The proposition is not to replace existing institutions but to complement them. It is to recognise that conventional measures are too slow when corruption becomes systemic. Courts, commissions, hearings and investigative units expose but do not close.
A Corruption TRC would close. It would invite confession in exchange for conditional amnesty. It would impose restitution and exclusion from office. It would prosecute those who conceal, lie and perpetrate systemic theft. It would draw on international precedent, historical necessity and institutional theory.
Above all, it would transform exposure into closure.
South Africa has lived too long in cycles of outrage without resolution. A Corruption TRC would not erase guilt, but it would reclaim truth, recover resources and release national energy for the urgent tasks of development, security and renewal.
Vasu Gounden and his Accord team, with their vast experience in transitional justice work on the continent, can offer valuable insights to this frontier idea.
Busani Ngcaweni is director: Centre for Public Policy and African Studies, University of Johannesburg.
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