Ask most people who pays for their city, and they will say the government does, helped along by their rates. Both halves of that are wrong, and the second half is wrong in a way that should decide how you vote.

According to their audited figures for last year, Johannesburg, Cape Town and eThekwini each raised about 86% of their own money. The State supplied roughly 14%. A metro is not a branch office of national government. It is closer to a business owned by its customers.

But look at where that 86% comes from. Property rates are only about a fifth of it. Close to half is service charges, which is a polite way of saying your city buys electricity and water wholesale and sells them to you.

So a city is not really funded by rates. It is funded by selling you power and water, and it lives or dies on two things. Whether it collects what it bills, and whether the product reaches you at all before it leaks away.

That is where three cities that look alike on paper stop looking alike.

Start with collection. The three figures are not quite the same kind of number, which is worth noting in its own right. Cape Town’s audited accounts show that its collection rate was almost 98% last year. eThekwini’s mayor told his council that the city collects 94%. Johannesburg’s budget for this year assumes it will collect 86%.

Sit with that last point. A city that budgets at 86% has already written off fourteen rand in every hundred before the year starts. That is not a collection failure. It is a collection expectation.

On the other side of the meter, Cape Town loses 24% of its water before it reaches a customer. Johannesburg loses 45% of its water and 30% of its electricity. eThekwini’s non-revenue water stood at almost 59%, against its own target of 53%.

Put the two together, and you do not need a calculator. A city expecting R86 in every R100 it bills, on water of which it has already lost nearly half, is not short of money because its residents are poor. It is short of money because the pipe leaks at both ends.

Then comes the part nobody campaigns on.

On 7 July this year, National Treasury withheld about R13.5 billion from 69 municipalities that had persistently failed to pay their creditors. It withheld the equitable share, the slice of national tax revenue that every municipality is constitutionally entitled to and that largely funds free basic water, electricity and refuse removal for poor households. It is not a favour. It is a right, and the State suspended it. Not under emergency powers. Under section 216 of the Constitution, which has now been invoked against 75 municipalities.

The City of Johannesburg was one of them, at about R3.6 billion. Cape Town and eThekwini were not.

And here is the detail worth sitting with. Johannesburg received part of its money back early, earmarked. It was released specifically so the city could pay Eskom and Rand Water. The State did not merely withhold a city’s money. For a period, it decided which of that city’s creditors were paid first.

That is what a council forfeits when it cannot manage its own accounts. Thirty-seven municipalities are currently under provincial intervention. One hundred and sixteen municipalities, close to half the country, adopted budgets this year that they could not fund, committing R288 billion they do not have.

The less a council manages, the less it decides. This means the vote is not really about what a council promises to build. It is about whether it will still be deciding anything in three years.

Which is where this becomes more hopeful than it sounds, because what separates the councils that retain control is almost disappointingly ordinary.

The Auditor-General has been explicit about it. The municipalities that run well do the same unglamorous things. Preventive controls that are genuinely institutionalised rather than merely written down. Action plans that are tracked. An internal audit function that means something. Consequences when people do not perform. And above all, stability in two jobs: the municipal manager and the chief financial officer.

Stability is the one you can measure. Of the 215 municipalities that responded to Treasury’s last survey, 42 had no one permanently in the chief financial officer’s chair. That is one in five, running on a stand-in or with no one at all. In ten of them, the stand-in had been there for two years.

None of this is about money the sector does not have. Treasury’s own review, published alongside last week’s mini budget, found that most municipalities have enough to cover day-to-day operations and spend too much of it on running themselves.

The gap is not a funding issue. It is a management issue.

So go back to that 86%. You are not a beneficiary of your municipality. You are its single largest source of funding. Nobody who owns that much of a business leaves the choice of who runs it to whoever happens to show up that day. A shareholder who does not vote has not abstained. They have handed their say to whoever did.

Before 4 November, one number matters more than every promise you will hear. Not the budget. Not the capital plan. The collection rate: how much of what the council bills it actually collects. It is published, it is dull, and it predicts almost everything else.

A council that collects what it is owed can pay Eskom, maintain its pipes and make its own decisions. A council that cannot will spend the next five years with those decisions made elsewhere, by people you did not elect.

You are already paying for it. What is on the ballot is who gets to spend it.

 

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.