Over the weekend, the major political parties staged their final rallies before South Africans vote on November 4.
The DA held its national closing event in Mamelodi, Tshwane, under the slogan “Stop the chaos. Start service delivery".
The EFF gathered at Orlando Stadium in Soweto for its Tshela Thupa rally.
On Sunday, the ANC held its Siyanqoba Rally at Sisa Dukashe Stadium in Mdantsane, with party president Cyril Ramaphosa as the main speaker.
These rallies marked the end of the formal campaign and also underline how far the contest has moved from the liberation narrative to the hard question of whether municipalities still work or not.
As a politics student watching those final gatherings, the dominant sensation was not hope but a quiet recognition that the old scripts have run out of road.
The numbers remain unforgiving, especially with recent polls placing the ANC nationally in the low-to-mid 30s, which is a steep drop from its 40.2% in 2024.
In Johannesburg, the DA leads near 36%, the ANC nearer 22%, and in eThekwini the MKP has polled as high as 43%.
These figures are not just numbers but map the lived reality of the voters: water shortages that force the schools and clinics to close, collapsing the roads and sewage systems, intermittent electricity, and the crime that has become so ambient.
Service delivery is no longer a slogan but the metric by which parties are being measured, and many municipalities have failed that metric for years.
What makes this moment distinct is that voters appear to be treating local government as the actual site of power.
For three decades, the ANC could lean on liberation credentials, but that currency has depreciated now.
When the residents speak of unreliable water supply, they are not debating ideology; they are describing the daily negotiation of dignity.
The final rallies this weekend were definitely loud but the silence of empty taps and broken infrastructure are louder still.
The political violence continues to darken the picture.
At least 42 people have been killed in suspected political assassinations since January this year — that is already higher than the full-year totals for the 2021 and 2024 election cycles.
When the candidates and councillors are murdered with such regularity, the democratic process itself is being contested by force rather than argument.
KwaZulu-Natal remains the most visible flashpoint, but the pattern is not confined there only.
The other defining feature is fragmentation, where more than 500 parties are contesting and hung councils are expected across the metros of Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, Nelson Mandela Bay, Buffalo City and eThekwini.
The government of national unity has already shown that coalition politics can be sustained, if uneasily.
However, local government elections will now test whether the same parties that share national cabinets can negotiate municipal power without descending into paralysis or patronage battles.
In the Eastern Cape, the stakes feel particularly sharp, Buffalo City and Nelson Mandela Bay having long been sites of contested governance and chronic service failures.
The ANC’s decision to hold its national Siyanqoba Rally in Mdantsane was therefore both symbolic and necessary because the coalition arrangements here have historically been fragile, so the 2026 results will likely force another round of horse-trading.
For the voters, the question is not merely who wins a mayoral chain but it is whether local government can recover the capacity to perform the most basic functions of a developmental state such as providing water, sanitation, refuse, roads, and safety, while operating under conditions of political multipolarity.
There is a temptation to read these elections as the final unravelling of ANC hegemony.
Although the reading is premature, the party retains its residual loyalty and organisational reach but the direction of travel is clear: the era of one-party dominance at local level is ending.
What replaces it is not yet coherent but politics organised around service delivery rather than historical narrative is emerging, yet it remains vulnerable to populism and institutional failure.
SA’s democracy has proven more resilient than many predicted after 2024.
The fact that we are still holding competitive elections is itself an achievement but resilience is not the same as renewal.
The water crises, the infrastructure decay, the body count of political killings, and the proliferation of parties that cannot govern alone all point to a deeper deficit: the gap between the formal architecture of democracy and the material conditions of citizenship.
On Wednesday, the country will not decide its national future. It will, however, decide whether local government remains a site of managed decline or becomes the place where accountability is finally enforced.
The weekend's final rallies definitely generated noise and spectacle.
The real test begins when the stages are dismantled and the voters demand results that can be measured in working taps, safer streets and municipalities that simply function.
Asipheamandla Qanga, a master’s student in political science at the University of Fort Hare