---
title: "Why a party can lose a city’s water and keep its ward"
description: "In South Africa there are deep-rooted connections between fatherlessness and our electoral behaviour. Like a child waiting at the gate for an absent father, we vote out of loyalty to leaders who never arrive, as we confuse historical gratitude with accountability."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Opinionistas"
author: "Themba Dlamini"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/themba-dlamini/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-07-29-why-a-party-can-lose-a-citys-water-and-keep-its-ward/"
published: "2026-07-29T21:23:07"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 1677
---

# Why a party can lose a city’s water and keep its ward

> In South Africa there are deep-rooted connections between fatherlessness and our electoral behaviour. Like a child waiting at the gate for an absent father, we vote out of loyalty to leaders who never arrive, as we confuse historical gratitude with accountability.

By Themba Dlamini · Published 29 July 2026, 23:23 SAST

## Content

![Image](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/ToEp388PygKxbVnnboBpUQ3buys=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/label-Opinion.jpg)

There is a particular kind of waiting that only fatherless children know.

You do not wait at the window. That is too obvious, and children learn early to hide what they want. You wait at the tap. You wait at the gate with a job in your hands – a tyre to roll, a goat to chase, water to carry – so that when the taxi comes over the rise and stops and starts again without him, nobody can say you were waiting. You were busy. You were just standing there.

I did that waiting in a village in the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, in the years when the country was being born and I was being raised by women who never once said the word abandoned in front of me. It took me most of my adult life to understand that the damage was never really the man. The damage was the posture. The waiting bent me into a shape. It taught me to organise my whole life around someone who was not coming, and to call that loyalty.

I have come to believe that this is also how we vote.

**The photograph on the wall**

In many South African homes there is a photograph of someone who is owed everything. A father, an uncle, a brother who went to Angola, a grandmother who buried a son and never got a body. That debt is real. People marched, people burned, people disappeared, and the vote you hold in a local government election year is the last inch of ground they won.

But a photograph cannot fix a roof.

This is easy to say cruelly and difficult to say truthfully. Gratitude is a debt we owe to history. It is not a service delivery plan. A liberation movement earned the right to be remembered; it did not earn the right to be exempt from judgement. The confusion of those two things is the single most powerful force in our politics.

Because when you love a man in a photograph, every complaint about him feels like betrayal. You defend him to your friends. You explain his absence in the language of circumstance: it is the economy, it is the legacy, it is apartheid, it is the courts. Some of those explanations are even true. That is what makes them so useful.

And every five years, the man arrives. He comes with a T-shirt and a food parcel and a promise, and he stands in the yard where you have been waiting, and something in your chest breaks open with relief – and you are eight years old again, and you would give him anything, and you do.

Then the taxi leaves.

**Sons who left with the surname**

Watch what has happened to our political landscape and you will see a family, not an ideology.

Outsiders try to read us on a left-right axis and get nowhere, and we tell them it is because our politics is about race and history. That is partly true. The deeper truth is that we are not arguing about economics at all. We are arguing about who is family, and who has the right to speak in the name of the father.

Look at the splinters, and name them. Inkatha went first – revived in the mid-Seventies as a legal vehicle while the ANC was banned, carrying the same colours and some of the same people, then breaking away over the armed struggle and sanctions. Then Cope, over a leader deposed at Polokwane. Then the EFF, over a young man expelled. Then MK, over a former president who had run out of room inside the house. Four departures, and every one a variation on the same sentence: we are the true heirs, and you are the ones who lost the faith.

Each takes the surname on the way out, and insists that it, not the household it left, is the real continuation of the struggle. The fight is not over the future. It is a fight over an estate.

Inkatha is the case that should stop us. It left first, over method rather than loyalty, and it could claim an older lineage of its own, running back through the Zulu royal house to the 1920s – it was not deserting the family, it said, but returning to an ancestor. And then, through the late Eighties and into the transition, that argument became a war. Something in the order of 20,000 people died in it, most of them in the province I come from, many of them poor, almost none of them the men whose quarrel it was. It was not a pure family fight either: much of the killing was [funded and armed by a state standing outside the gate](https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/volume%202.pdf), delighted to see the house burn from within. The quarrel was real, and it was made worse by people who wanted it. We do not argue in this country like strangers. We argue like brothers, which is why our arguments have always been able to go further than they should.

And parties that were never in the will spend their energy proving they are not strangers in the yard.

This is the emotional physics of South African politics, and it explains what analysis alone cannot: why a party can lose a city’s water and keep its ward, why a scandal that would end a career elsewhere is absorbed here as family embarrassment, why people furious about their lives still cannot bring themselves to mark a different box. It is not stupidity, and it is not quite loyalty. It is the child at the gate, refusing to say out loud the thing he has known for years.

**The house with many doors and no accounting**

We also built a system that makes this easy.

Proportional representation gave us something precious: nobody’s vote is wasted. But with no threshold at all, it also made leaving cheap. In 2024, [52 parties stood on the national ballot and 18 took seats](https://pmg.org.za/blog/Election%20Results%20and%20Allocation%20of%20Seats%20in%20Parliament%20National%20Assembly%20and%20Provincial%20Legislatures%202024) – some on [less than a quarter of 1% of the vote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2024_South_African_general_election), about 40,000 people in a country of [63 million](https://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022025.pdf). We do not have too many parties by accident. We have them by design.

The cost is not clutter. It is that responsibility evaporates. When a closed list decides who sits, the member answers upward to the party, not outward to you. Nobody is anybody’s. A household where every adult can slip out a different door and still be fed is not a household – it is a boarding house.

Your ward councillor is the only politician in this country whose name you personally put in office. Not a list. Not a caucus. A name. There are [4,468 of them](https://www.elections.org.za/content/Documents/Voter-education/Continuous-Voter-Education/How-Council-seats-are-calculated/). It is the smallest piece of accountable power we have – and in 2021, [fewer than 46% of registered voters](https://www.elections.org.za/pw/Elections-and-results/Municipal-Elections-2021) turned out to choose one, the lowest turnout in our democratic history.

Where were their councillors?

Ask most South Africans about young men and crime and you will get an argument about punishment. Ask a pastor and you will get a list of funerals.

I have sat in enough front rooms with enough mothers to notice what is almost never there: a man of the previous generation. The question that hangs over the tea and the plastic chairs is always the same – where were their fathers? – and it is asked as though it were about character.

I want to ask it in a second key. Where were their councillors? Where was the budget line for the field they should have been playing on, the clinic their mothers should have reached, the streetlight on the road they walked home in the dark? Fatherlessness in this country was not a moral failure that fell from the sky. It was engineered – by taxes payable only in cash, which pushed men onto the mines; by the Natives Land Act of 1913; by a compound system built on housing men without their families and calling it employment. Then it was normalised. Then it was inherited.

Absence is not a personal tragedy that happens to individuals. It is a political outcome. And I do not think the state has replaced anybody’s father. What I think is smaller and harder to shake: the state has inherited the posture. It arrives from far away, at intervals, with something in its hands. And we have learnt to wait for it exactly as we waited for them.

**The gate**

What would an honest system look like? Not a perfect one – I am an accountant, and I have never met a clean set of books that was not the result of somebody’s boring, daily discipline. It would look like a system where responsibility has a name and an address. Where a councillor can be removed by the people who put him there. Where a threshold makes leaving costly enough that people work out their disagreements in the room, and where the numbers are published in a form a person in my village could read.

But no system will do the first part for us, because the first part is not structural. It is filial.

Adulthood, for a fatherless boy, begins on the day he stops standing at the gate pretending not to wait. Nobody claps. You turn around, walk back into the house, and start dealing with what is actually there – the roof, the water, the money, the people who did in fact raise you.

That is what registering to vote is. That is what learning your ward number is. That is what asking a councillor for a budget breakdown is. It is not disloyalty and it is not bitterness. It is the moment a country stops organising its life around a man who is not coming, and starts asking the people in the house what they have done with the money.

I loved my father. I mourn what I never got from him. And I am no longer waiting at the gate.

Neither should we be. **DM**