Anatomy of a Municipal Meltdown: Revenues, Redistribution, Infrastructure and Post-Apartheid’s Fragile Social Contract

As South Africa’s governing African National Congress unravelled in the late 2010s, a new stream of research emerged on the crisis of urban governance – power cuts, water outages – as municipal budgets faltered and ageing infrastructure cracked. These crises were sharpest in South Africa’s secondary cities, which had faster rates of demographic growth, higher rates of poverty and weaker fiscal bases: hence this study of Pietermaritzburg/Msunduzi. We argue that rather than centrally focusing on clientelism and corruption inside the ruling party – there is already plenty of excellent research in this vein – researchers might gain new insights by looking at the relationships between state and society (‘social contracts’) embedded in fiscal relationships. Crucially, large and mid-sized South African cities fund most of their redistributive reconstruction and development programmes from local taxes and service charges. Hence, Pietermaritzburg/Msunduzi’s financial meltdown may be explained if we focus centrally on the collapse of the social contract.