Rabia Mayet | rabiamayet@radioislam.co.za

01 October 2026

2-minute read

As KwaZulu Natal prepares for the upcoming local government elections, voters are being asked to choose the people who will be responsible for overseeing the delivery of basic services in their daily lives.

According to Dr Jabulani Nyawo, senior lecturer in public governance at UKZN, there are “quite a number of challenges” facing rural municipalities in KZN, many of them that are not new, with the most important being:

• Weak governance.
• High levels of poverty and unemployment that are driving people into urban areas.
• Skills shortages with rural municipalities failing to “attract and retain qualified officials” to take charge of service delivery matters.
• Lack of accountability among the administrative and political leadership leading to failure to implement audit action plans and address and rectify misconduct.
• Poor financial management, budgeting, revenue collection and debt management.
• Inability of these municipalities to generate their own revenue, relying on the grant they receive from National Treasury.
• Poor infrastructure.
• The issue of water and sanitation failures.

Dr Jabulani says that service delivery issues persist in these municipalities because of the weak accountability and poor calibre of councillors representing the people.

He advises voters to familiarise themselves with the IDP, the Integrated Development Plan, which is the official document outlining “the plans and priorities of the municipality,”. This in turn will allow voters to hold political and administrative leadership to account; question why targets were not achieved and what leadership has done about it.

Listen to the full interview with Mufti Moosagie and Dr Jabulani Nyawo here.