Staff Reporter
The DA has hit back at ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula after he branded its plan to bring private businesses into municipal service delivery “Thatcherite”, accusing him of falling back on ideology rather than confronting the ANC’s poor record in local government.
Mbalula took aim at the DA’s 2026 local government election manifesto in a post on X on Monday, two days after the party launched it at Mary Fitzgerald Square in Johannesburg.
He said it was a “Thatcherite manifesto” advocating the “privatization of the state”, and added the DA was only part of the Government of National Unity (GNU) because of the “collapse” of the ANC’s majority.
The governing party lost its outright majority in the May 2024 national election and subsequently entered the GNU with the DA and several smaller parties.
DA federal council chairperson Ashor Sarupen on Wednesday turned Mbalula’s criticism back on the ANC, saying it revealed how little the party had to say about the substance of the DA’s municipal proposals.
“Confronted with a DA manifesto focused on getting broken municipalities working again, Mbalula reached for ideological labels from 1980s Britain because he cannot defend the ANC’s own record of government,” Sarupen said.
The DA has said that councils should be able to bring in private operators where they lack the capacity to provide reliable services themselves. It has rejected the contention that this amounts to wholesale privatisation, saying municipalities would retain control over policy, tariffs and service standards.
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Sarupen said the measure of the policy should be whether residents received the services for which they paid.
“South Africans do not care whether the ANC can attach an ideological label to a refuse truck. They care whether the refuse truck arrives. They do not care who owns the equipment that repairs a burst pipe. They want water coming out of their taps,” he said.
He also pointed to the use of private-sector involvement in municipalities governed by the ANC, including Mafube and KwaDukuza, saying that the party was prepared to use such arrangements where services were under pressure, while attacking the DA for proposing the same.
“For too long, the ANC confused state ownership with state capacity. It built a system in which politicians controlled everything, while increasingly struggling to make those things work,” Sarupen said.
He said the DA was not proposing that government abandon its responsibility for basic services, but that councils should be pragmatic about who actually delivers them.
“Where the state can deliver a service efficiently, it should. Where working with businesses, communities or other partners can deliver a better service, faster and at better value for residents, government should have the common sense to do so.”
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“That is not ‘Thatcherism’. It is called governing,” he said.
The ANC is due to launch its local government manifesto on 23 August in Diepsloot.
This will be the first local election it contests since losing its national majority, leaving it in the unusual position of fighting the DA for votes in cities and towns while governing alongside it nationally.
