At the end of this year South Africans will vote in the most consequential local government election in our democratic history. In many towns and cities, the question is not simply which party will govern. It is whether residents can finally break the patronage machines that have captured basic services, hollowed out institutions and turned public money into private political currency.
South African municipalities face challenges born of our own history, including apartheid spatial planning and decades of ANC misgovernment. But we are not the first country to confront urban machines built on patronage, fear, dependency and access to jobs. Other cities have faced this before. Some defeated it. We should learn from them.
New York
William “Boss” Tweed was the most notorious leader of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party machine that dominated New York City politics for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Tammany was a vast urban patronage network that helped people find jobs, obtain favours, navigate the courts, secure coal in winter and access the city’s bureaucracy. In return, it expected votes, loyalty and silence.
In 1871, the New York Times published evidence that Tweed and his associates had stolen between $25-million and $200-million from New York City’s treasury. Construction of a courthouse budgeted at $250,000 had ballooned to $13-million. Tweed was arrested, convicted, escaped to Spain, was identified there from a political cartoon (Thomas Nast’s caricatures had made his face famous across the Atlantic) and died in prison in 1878. Reform had triumphed.
Except it hadn’t. Tammany Hall outlasted Tweed by nearly 90 years.
The story of how New York finally dismantled its patronage machine and why it took so agonisingly long, holds lessons that South African cities cannot afford to ignore. The machine that has captured our water utilities, that embedded itself in procurement systems, manipulated housing lists, that hollowed out municipalities across the country, is not a uniquely South African invention. It has existed in other cities, in other centuries, and it has been dismantled before. The lesson from New York is that the defeat required more than prosecutions. It required understanding why the machine existed in the first place.
Corruption persists because it serves a purpose
Tammany Hall began in 1789 as a fraternal society for ordinary working men. By the mid-19th century, as wave after wave of immigrants arrived in New York, it became the first institution many of them encountered that actually helped them. A ward boss knew your name. When your husband was arrested, the boss could get him out. When you needed a job, he found you one. When winter came and you couldn’t afford coal, he sent it. In return, you voted the right way and kept your mouth shut.
This is the feature of machine politics that reformers too often underestimated, namely that the machine is not merely parasitic. In many cases it delivers practical services to people who have no other source of support. That is the basis of its legitimacy, and legitimacy is what makes it so hard to dislodge.
This may feel familiar to South Africans. Patronage networks in municipalities survive not through coercion alone but because they sit at the intersection of people’s basic needs such as housing allocations, services, permits, tender awards and employment. The machine, here as in New York, is a form of parallel welfare state. Until the formal state does those things reliably and well, the machine retains its purpose and its constituency.
Prosecutions are necessary, but nowhere near sufficient
Between Tweed’s fall in the 1870s and Tammany’s eventual collapse in the 1960s, New York elected a series of reform mayors who won on anti-corruption platforms, cleaned things up, then watched Tammany come back. William Strong won in 1894. Seth Low in 1901. John Purroy Mitchel in 1913. Each time, the machine returned.
The prosecutions of Tweed were real and necessary. But Tammany as institution survived them because the underlying conditions – the dependence, the patronage, the absence of any credible alternative – remained unchanged. Reform mayors were better at governing but worse at politics. They cleaned up procurement but didn’t replace what the machine had been providing. When the poor found themselves without recourse, Tammany’s base came home.
This is a cautionary note for South Africa’s accountability institutions and reforming local governments alike. The Zondo Commission, the National Prosecuting Authority’s belated prosecutions, the Auditor-General's damning findings – all necessary, none sufficient on their own. Winning an election or securing a conviction does not dissolve networks built over decades. They go underground and wait. If better governance doesn’t follow, the political logic that built the machine remains fully intact.
What finally broke Tammany – and why the timing mattered
Fiorello La Guardia won the New York mayoralty in 1934 and served for 12 years. He was combative, theatrical and relentlessly focused on visible results, but the theatre was in service of something structural. La Guardia attacked the machine at its root: the patronage appointment system. By expanding the civil service and requiring competitive examinations for City jobs, he removed the machine’s primary tool for rewarding loyalty. Without the ability to deliver jobs, a ward boss is just a man who turns up at your door.
Tammany’s power was never primarily financial, it was positional. The machine controlled who got hired, who got promoted, who got the contract. Financial corruption flowed from that positional control. South Africa’s State Capture followed the same logic: a systematic project of positional capture – placing loyalists in SOE boards, prosecutorial leadership and municipal management. The Zondo Commission documented the financial consequences. The mechanism was the destruction of meritocratic appointment. Rebuilding it is unglamorous, slow and fiercely resisted, but it is the work that matters most.
La Guardia was also aided by forces beyond his direct control. Roosevelt’s New Deal channelled federal money to cities through structures that bypassed Tammany entirely, making the machine redundant as an intermediary. At the same time, Tammany’s voter base was shifting as immigrant communities were assimilating, their children earning degrees and union cards, no longer needing a ward boss to navigate city life. The machine’s social function faded as the state, haltingly, began doing its job. La Guardia’s genius was recognising this window and driving structural reform through it with maximum force.
South Africa has equivalent legislative architecture in the Public Service Act, the Municipal Systems Act and competitive appointment requirements. The gap is not legal but political. The willingness to enforce these rules against one’s own allies, not just one’s opponents, and the ambition to deliver services at a scale that makes patronage networks genuinely redundant.
In Cape Town, we have made competitive, merit-based appointment non-negotiable. It is the foundation on which every other improvement rests. Our water system works not because we found people loyal to the DA, but because we appointed competent engineers and protected them from political interference. The distinction between loyalty and competence is the difference between a city that works and a city that decays.
Residents do not experience “merit-based appointment” as an HR policy. They experience it as water in the tap, refuse collected on time, roads maintained and bills that make sense.
A century is a cost we cannot afford
New York took 100 years to dismantle its machine. That timeline should stop every South African in their tracks. A century means failing water systems, houses unbuilt, children schooled in collapsing institutions, businesses strangled by corrupt licensing across four generations. For millions of South Africans, the human cost of decades of machine politics is not an abstraction. It is a life spent without reliable water, without a title deed, without safety.
We have at least one metro, the City of Cape Town, that is showing what is possible. But the Tammany lesson is unambiguous: legal accountability alone will not end this. What is required is the full combination – prosecutions, yes, but also the relentless rebuilding of meritocratic institutions and the delivery of services at a scale that makes patronage networks redundant.
La Guardia needed waves of change to combine: his own political will, Roosevelt’s New Deal and a generation that had outgrown its dependence on the machine. South Africa needs to engineer that wave of change deliberately, and faster. The ward bosses of Tammany Hall understood that their power rested on being useful. The ANC’s municipal machines understand the same thing. The answer to that kind of power is not merely to prosecute it. It is to make it unnecessary – by delivering so well, so consistently, that residents no longer need to trade their vote for a water connection.
That is the task before South Africa’s cities in 2026. To break the machines, rebuild the institutions, and prove again that clean, capable government can change people’s lives. DM