We have voted, and new councils are about to take over. Around mid-December, somebody in your street will say nothing has changed. The potholes are where they were (or worse). The bin truck came late. The bill is still wrong. They will be right about all of it, and wrong about what it means.
A new council does not take over a running business and change the manager. It takes over a drawer full of paperwork. The drawer holds three years of audit reports, what the municipality owes and to whom, the contracts it is tied to, and a budget somebody else wrote that it must spend. Nothing can be fixed until all of it is read, and that takes months. What follows is why, and what to watch for.
Before any of that, the council cannot lawfully do much. The Electoral Commission has seven days to declare the result. The municipal manager then has fourteen days to call the first sitting, which must elect a speaker before it may do anything else, then the executive mayor and mayoral committee. In 2021 the result was declared on 4 November, and most metros first sat on 22 November, the second-last day available. eThekwini’s sitting collapsed and reconvened two days later. Expect the last week of November before most councils can decide anything.
Then, when they can act, they still do not know what is wrong. A municipality has three layers of knowledge, and they barely overlap. Residents know the symptoms: the water pressure drops on Tuesdays, the streetlight has been out since June. Councillors know the reports, which are late. Only the finance office knows what is owed, to whom, and when it falls due. The distance between the first and the third is where a term gets lost. It matters more than the ballot suggests: many of us vote in a ward run by one party inside a council run by another, and winning a ward does not give you control of the money.
Most of what the new council inherits is already fixed. The outgoing council approved the budget before the end of June, and it runs until next July. Nobody can touch it until the mid-year assessment lands in late January, and then only through an adjustments budget tabled by the mayor before the end of February. Their own first budget covers the year from July 2027. That is seven months of governing on somebody else’s arithmetic. The debts are not theirs either. Eskom told Parliament last month that municipalities owed it more than R120 billion as at August. The contracts the last council signed bind this one, because the municipality is the party to them.
I have taken over finance functions mid-year, and the first thing you learn is how much of the year was decided before you arrived. A municipality is that, on a five-year cycle, in public.
History helps with two things and is useless for a third. It measures the inheritance and puts a clock on the process: twenty-seven councils were hung in 2016, meaning no party had a majority, and sixty-six in 2021; the more parties that must agree, the longer every step takes. Johannesburg had at least four different mayors in under three years. History cannot tell you what new people will do. Where a council changes hands, nothing in the last five years predicts the people now holding it. They inherit the paperwork, not the record, and deserve to be judged on it.
The decision worth watching is not who becomes mayor. It is who runs the money, and whether that person is still there in three years. The municipal manager’s contract cannot run beyond a year after the next council’s election. The Auditor-General’s report in June asked for special attention to the finance members of mayoral committees in the metros. That seat decides whether a budget is a plan or a wish.
Which brings us to why this happens every five years, and what is new. In October, the national cooperative governance department, the National Treasury and SALGA, the municipalities’ own association, issued a joint circular requiring two written handovers before the first council meeting, one political and one administrative. The municipal manager and chief financial officer must report on three years of audit outcomes, irregular expenditure, creditors, debtors, service backlogs and, in as many words, whether the budget is funded. Outgoing councils were told not to take decisions that would bind their successors. The paperwork now comes with an index. Nobody has written down how good those reports must be, or what happens if they are thin.
What remains unfixed is the order. SALGA told Parliament in October that induction for the new councillors is planned for January. By then, they will have elected a speaker and a mayor, appointed the committee that runs the finances, and started making decisions. The documents arrive before the first meeting. The training to read them arrives two months after it. That is the recurrence in one sentence: we hand people the file, then we teach them to read it.
So here is what to do with December. If nothing is visible by then, that is not a broken promise. It is the calendar. Give them to the end of February, when they can first touch the money, and to the end of June, when they must produce their own budget. Then watch two things, neither of which needs a meeting. Is the same person still running the finances, and do the audits say that is good news? And has what the municipality owes stopped climbing?
We are owed change, and entitled to say so loudly. They are owed the months it takes to work out what they are holding. Neither of those cancels the other. A resident who understands the first ninety days is harder to mislead in the ninety that follow.
Yusuf Bodiat is a chartered accountant, certified director and former chief financial officer. He is the founder of Pragmatic Thinking, an independent strategic advisory firm, and serves as a non-executive director on several boards. He is the author of The Bottom Line: A CFO’s Blueprint for South Africa’s Turnaround, published in February 2026.
