Looking for Musa: South Africans have lost civic agency and need to start building again

Every night across South Africa, millions of people perform the same ritual.

Gates locked. Alarm armed. WhatsApp location shared. Electric fence checked. Water tank monitored. Generator fuel counted. Children tracked on phones. Community groups activated.

Then the country goes to sleep behind walls.

Not because South Africans are naturally paranoid. Because we have quietly adapted to living inside uncertainty.

We no longer experience South Africa primarily as a functioning, shared public system. Increasingly, we experience it as a private survival project.

And perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the strange contradiction now shaping the country: South Africans expect more from the state than ever before, while trusting the state less than ever before.

That contradiction is quietly exhausting the nation.

Before 1994, millions of black South Africans lived under a state that was often hostile, inaccessible and openly oppressive. Communities learnt to survive because they had to. Churches stepped in where institutions failed. Burial societies carried families through grief. Stokvels financed survival and dignity. Neighbours built homes together. Streets organised themselves. Civic organisations became lifelines.

The point is that the agency we developed under impossible conditions is now disappearing under tolerable ones.

I think of my older brother, Musa, in Nkabini village in rural KwaZulu-Natal during those years. For most of my childhood, the village had no tap at all. To drink, to cook, to wash, to bathe – every drop of water had to be carried in. The women and children climbed almost a kilometre uphill to the natural spring, or walked down to the river, and returned with 20-litre buckets perfectly balanced on their heads.

Water was not something that arrived. It was something a village fetched, every day, on its own back.

Then Musa made water arrive.

A village schoolteacher decided the village should have water – and then found a way. Not the municipality. Not a development programme. Him. He persuaded, he organised, he pushed.

And eventually a single communal tap stood in the village – one tap for everyone, flowing at random hours, sometimes drying up for days, but water nonetheless. Over the years the leaking tap would carve a miniature canyon down the muddy footpath leading to it – a small geological record of a village fetching its own dignity, one 20-litre bucket at a time.

When the tap dried up, we went back up the hill to the spring. We knew how.

The village had not forgotten how to carry itself.

This is not nostalgia. Apartheid was not a school of civic virtue – it was a violence that forced communities to invent what the state denied them. The point is not that we were stronger when we suffered. The point is that the agency we developed under impossible conditions is now disappearing under tolerable ones.

As the role of the state expanded, many of the civic muscles that once held communities together began to weaken.

Democracy rightly changed expectations.

A free South Africa was supposed to mean more than survival. It was supposed to mean dignity through functioning public institutions – housing, sanitation, healthcare, policing, schools, electricity, roads, opportunity. These were not luxuries. They were moral necessities after centuries of exclusion.

The expansion of the democratic state was therefore not wrong. In many ways, it was deeply just.

When the first local government elections came, the villagers of Nkabini elected Musa as one of the country’s first councillors. They were not asking him to start doing something new. They were asking him to keep doing – now with a title, now with a budget, now with the imprimatur of a state that finally recognised them as citizens – what he had already been doing for years without anyone’s permission.

The tap. The school runs. The advocacy. The fixing of things.

The democratic state did not create his public-mindedness. It was already there. Democracy was meant to amplify it.

But over time something else happened.

As the role of the state expanded, many of the civic muscles that once held communities together began to weaken. And then, tragically, the state itself began to fail.

Municipal collapse spread across towns and cities. Corruption hollowed out institutions. Cadre deployment weakened competence. Infrastructure decayed. Public trust eroded. The very state that citizens had increasingly been trained to rely on became unstable itself.

And now South Africa finds itself in an unusually dangerous position: a society with enormous expectations and weakening collective agency.

The instinct of earlier generations was often:

“How do we organise ourselves?”

The instinct now is increasingly:

“Where is the government?”

Many South Africans no longer believe they possess meaningful agency outside the state. We wait for municipalities to clean spaces that no communities protect themselves. We wait for officials to restore systems that no citizens maintain. We wait for politicians to rescue a social fabric that many ordinary people no longer feel responsible to repair.

This must be said carefully. Millions of South Africans still display extraordinary resilience every day. Poor communities often demonstrate greater mutual care than affluent suburbs. Grants save lives. Structural inequality, itself shaped by apartheid’s legacy, remains brutally real.

But a society weakens when citizens lose the instinct for shared civic responsibility.

A village schoolteacher in 1989 brought water to a place that had never had it. A premier in 2026 books a hotel room to shower.

On my first day of Grade 1, Musa walked me to school. The school sat 2km across the Msunduzi River. The “bridge” was a flat, 15cm-wide metal rail. Children regularly lost their balance and fell into the river. Those who fell sat through class in wet clothes. Nobody was coming to build them a real bridge.

So the village walked, and slipped, and walked again.

I think of that rail often now. Not because it was romantic – it wasn’t. It was dangerous and unjust, and children should never have had to cross rivers on a strip of metal to learn to read. But because the village did not wait.

The village balanced. The village carried each other. The village improvised a country into existence on a 15cm rail.

Today, in towns with proper bridges and proper budgets and proper councils, citizens often cannot agree to fix a single pothole together.

The infrastructure improved faster than the civic imagination.

Consider where this leaves us now.

Johannesburg – South Africa’s economic engine – sits on top of the Vaal system, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, and one of the continent’s largest integrated water networks. Yet taps across parts of the city run dry for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Businesses in Selby have endured months of severe water instability. Daily throttling and water tankers have become a way of life for residents in parts of Kensington, Bez Valley and the CBD. Nearly half the city’s water is lost through leaks, burst pipes, illegal connections and decaying infrastructure.

When the crisis hit hardest, the province’s premier told residents he felt their pain – and then admitted he had been going to a hotel to bathe.

A village schoolteacher in 1989 brought water to a place that had never had it. A premier in 2026, presiding over one of Africa’s largest urban water systems, books a hotel room to shower.

Johannesburg did not run out of engineering capacity before it ran out of civic seriousness.

No democracy can survive as a relationship of permanent consumption between citizens and the state. Healthy societies require both capable governments and capable citizens. One without the other eventually collapses into resentment, dependency, or decay.

And perhaps this is one reason the country feels so emotionally tired.

South Africans increasingly carry burdens privately that functioning societies normally carry publicly.

Private security instead of trusted policing. Private schooling instead of reliable education. Private healthcare instead of dependable hospitals. Private transport instead of safe public systems. Private generators instead of stable electricity. Private therapy instead of social cohesion.

Even hope itself has become privatised.

Many people no longer speak about “our future”. They speak about escape plans, back-up plans, side-hustles, semigration, offshore options, survival strategies for their own children.

The shared national imagination that once animated South Africa has fragmented into smaller and smaller islands of private concern.

This matters profoundly ahead of the local government elections.

Local government is the level closest to the tap and the bridge. It is where a councillor is supposed to be the modern Musa – not a politician harvesting loyalty, but a citizen with a title doing what citizens of conscience were already trying to do anyway.

Perhaps South Africa’s deepest crisis is that too many people no longer believe they can build anything unless the state arrives first.

Democracy cannot only be about historical loyalty, racial identity, struggle memory or emotional attachment to political brands. Liberation history deserves honour. The sacrifices that produced democracy must never be trivialised.

But liberation legitimacy cannot permanently substitute for present competence.

Roads are not racist. Electricity does not care about struggle credentials. Water systems do not respond to liberation songs. Functional government is morally measurable.

At some point every democracy must ask hard questions:

Who governs well? Who builds? Who delivers? Who strengthens civic responsibility instead of merely harvesting dependency?

We should be electing councillors who already act like citizens before we give them office – people who would have brought water whether or not anyone was watching.

The question is no longer only which party will rescue us. It is which candidates, in which communities, are already behaving like Musa was behaving in 1989 – before there was a state to ask, before there was a title to claim, before there was anything to gain from doing the right thing.

Because eventually even the most patient population begins to understand something dangerous: no government can fully carry a society whose civic muscles have atrophied.

Nations are not sustained by states alone.

They are sustained by citizens who still believe they have agency, responsibility, and obligations toward one another.

The tap is still there in Nkabini. So is the river. So is the hill to the spring. So, in many places across this country, are the village instincts that built things before the state arrived, and outlasted the state when it failed.

Perhaps South Africa’s deepest crisis is not only corruption, unemployment or failing infrastructure.

Perhaps it is that too many people no longer believe they can build anything unless the state arrives first.

A village boy with a wrench and a will brought water to a village that had only ever climbed for it. A teacher walked his little brother across a 15cm rail because that was the bridge they had, and a child needed to learn to read.

Today, in Johannesburg, residents wake before sunrise to fill buckets at municipal water tankers – performing the same ritual the women of Nkabini once performed at the spring before the tap arrived. Except now we do it in a city, beside dry taps that were once among the proudest engineering systems on the continent, while a state we built and pay for goes to a hotel to bathe.

And perhaps that is why the country feels heavier now.

We are no longer carrying South Africa together.

Increasingly, we are carrying it alone. DM