Three decades into our democratic constitutional order, South Africa faces a reckoning.
Constitutional rule is not new to SA. What is new, since 1996, is the claim that it belongs to all who live here. The 1910 Union Constitution was not “ours”. It was an imperial instrument that entrenched white minority rule and structured a political order in which the black majority was governed, dispossessed and denied meaningful citizenship.
The 1996 Constitution was meant to be a rupture: to widen belonging, bind the state to those it once discarded, and anchor governance in universal dignity and accountable administration.
Thirty years later, the text remains intact. The courage to enforce it has eroded.
On 12 February 2026, President Cyril Ramaphosa stood in Cape Town City Hall, the site where Nelson Mandela first addressed a free nation, to deliver the State of the Nation Address. The speech was thick with the language of renewal: a nation “turning a corner”, bread-and-butter issues prioritised, optimism returning.
For many listening from communities where taps had already run dry, the tone did not soothe. It jarred against lived reality.
How do you promise transformation to a people still negotiating the basics?
Across the country, decline has not merely settled. It has hardened.
Knysna’s crisis is narrated as a water problem. It is not. It is the cumulative outcome of years of instability, neglected infrastructure, weakened oversight, and consequence management that never materialises.
Makhanda has endured protests, litigation and court rulings affirming constitutional failure, yet the taps remain dry. The state responds with task teams and pledges, belated gestures of rescue for a crisis tolerated long before the collapse.
These were not unforeseen breakdowns. They were tolerated failures.
And the geography of decline is widening.
In Gauteng, the country’s economic heart, residents on the urban periphery and in high-lying suburbs entered a third consecutive week of water system failure, even as the Vaal Dam sat above capacity. Electro-mechanical breakdowns and burst pipes left millions improvising survival in the wealthiest province in the country.
Solidarity
Public schools dismissed learners by midday because sewage spilled into hallways. In the same week, a premier attempted solidarity by remarking that he too had to bathe at a hotel.
For the political class, collapse is an inconvenience managed by relocation. For citizens, it is a daily logistical and health emergency.
This raises a harder question than election-season outrage allows: How was this permitted to persist?
The governing party must answer for the systematic hollowing out of the state’s operational core. Patronage networks were protected rather than dismantled.
Technical capacity was sacrificed to political equilibrium. Reform was deferred when it threatened internal survival.
But constitutional accountability was never the responsibility of one party alone.
Opposition parties sit in legislatures. They chair committees. They hold subpoena powers, budget oversight authority, court access, and public platforms. Oversight is not ornamental. It is constitutional muscle.
Yet too often it has been episodic, flaring during moments of scandal only to stall behind procedural shields or political fatigue. The Digital Vibes scandal triggered outrage, but sustained parliamentary consequence was blunted by the familiar refuge of “sub judice”.
At the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa), oversight faltered when the board simply refused to attend hearings and consequences dissipated.
The same pattern has played out in coalition governments. In Johannesburg, coalition collapses have produced revolving-door mayors, frozen administrations, and service paralysis. Parties enter coalitions with the language of reform, then withdraw when governing becomes politically costly. Councils reset, motions of no confidence multiply and residents bear the consequences.
Managed decline
If accountability can be delayed, proceduralised or abandoned when it becomes inconvenient, managed decline becomes predictable.
Auditor-General reports have repeated the same warnings for years: irregular expenditure, procurement failures, weak internal controls, absent consequence management. Communities protested long before total collapse. Civil society litigated where politics failed.
And still there was no sustained cross-party insistence that this constituted political emergency. Instead, a pattern solidified: oversight softened, decline deepened, and failure became campaign material.
Allow collapse. Then campaign on collapse.
This is the politics of managed decline.
Preventing collapse requires disrupting patronage networks, rebuilding technical capacity, and confronting the political cost of reform. Exploiting collapse requires only rhetoric.
In this equilibrium, the governing party delays reform because it threatens internal networks. The opposition delays structural cooperation because visible failure sharpens its electoral argument. Communities absorb the cost.
This is no accident. It is incentive structure.
When the political cost of preventing collapse exceeds the cost of allowing it, collapse becomes the convenient political choice. But in a system where crisis unlocks emergency procurement, concentrates discretionary power, and resets contracting cycles, collapse does more than persist. It reorganises power.
Infrastructure failure justifies exceptional measures. Emergency spending expands executive discretion. Procurement becomes urgent rather than scrutinised. In that environment, breakdown is not only endured; it can become politically and materially useful to those positioned to manage the response.
What is rational becomes routine. But survivable for whom? The burden of managed decline does not fall equally.
When the state retreats, someone fills the gap. Water must still be fetched. Children must still be bathed. Sick relatives must still be cared for. School uniforms must still be washed. Workdays must still begin. This is the social reproductive crisis.
The promise of universal dignity is quietly subsidised by unpaid labour, overwhelmingly performed by women, forced to convert state failure into private endurance. The constitutional commitment to dignity is being upheld not by the state but by households absorbing systemic failure into already stretched bodies.
This is not soft abandonment. It is harsh, visible, and violently felt. It may not be legislated, but it is lived: in buckets carried across streets, in children sent home from contaminated schools, in hospital queues that stretch beyond dignity.
Different form of exclusion
What was meant to rupture a history of racial domination now risks entrenching a different form of exclusion. Rights remain printed, but delivery is perpetually deferred.
Thirty years ago, we chose a constitutional order grounded in universal dignity. The post-1994 settlement was meant to make abandonment unconstitutional. That promise has not vanished; it has been subordinated to political survival.
The primary responsibility for this erosion lies with those entrusted to govern and those constitutionally empowered to hold them to account. Citizens did not hollow out municipal systems. Citizens did not weaken consequence management. People are busy surviving, stretching wages, carrying water, navigating broken clinics, improvising stability in the face of state retreat.
It would be dishonest to pretend that the burden of repair rests equally on their shoulders. Elections remain one of the few instruments through which political culture can be interrupted. But the ballot alone cannot repair a political economy that has adapted to collapse.
If we reward performance without proof of sustained oversight, if we accept outrage in place of enforcement, managed decline will continue because it is electorally survivable for those at the top.
Three decades in, the question is no longer whether our founding text is flawed. It is whether we are prepared to enforce it.We have traded a constitutional order of perfected exclusion for one of promised dignity. But dignity cannot be eaten, and it does not flow from dry taps.
If accountability remains theatrical rather than binding, managed decline will define our trajectory.
The reckoning is here. Stop reciting the promise. Start enforcing the proof. DM
Sipho Mthathi is a writer and social justice activist with more than 23 years of experience shaping civil society work locally and internationally.