Article first published by News24 on 29 March 2025
In February, the National Planning Commission (NPC) convened a national dialogue on the state of service delivery in the country. This is an edited and abridged version of the remarks made by Professor Tinyiko Maluleke, TUT Vice-Chancellor and Principal and Deputy Chair of the NPC, at the conference.
I am an unmitigated sucker for poetry and a hopeless addict of such stunning book opening lines such as those of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa and Es'kia Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue.
In a line or two, they captured the essence of the national tragedy of their times. Service delivery is becoming a crisis of our times.
How I wish I had such powers of diction to capture the impact and the meaning of the service delivery problems in our country at this time. How I wish I had the turn of phrase with which to encourage my fellow South Africans to "rage, rage against the dying of the light" of service delivery a la Dylan Thomas.
During his recent pre-G20 reconnaissance visit to the Gauteng province, President Cyril Ramaphosa confirmed that the country is in the midst of a service delivery crisis.
Service delivery: The trouble with South Africa
In the city of Lagos in the early 1980s, Chinua Achebe noticed that everywhere he went, most conversations started with the phrase "the trouble with Nigeria is...". So, Achebe decided to write a book titled: The Trouble with Nigeria. Thus begins the book:
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.... The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmark of true leadership.
In relation to service delivery, South Africa may have reached a similar stage as was the Nigeria of the early 1980s. An Achebian take on the trouble with South Africa at this time, might read like this:
The trouble with South Africa is simply and squarely a failure of service delivery. There is nothing basically wrong with the South African character. There is nothing wrong with South African land or climate or water or air or anything else. The South African problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility of service delivery, which is the hallmark of true leadership at this point in our history.
Prof Tinyiko Maluleke, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the Tshwane University of Technology.
The most common phrase on the lips of South Africans at this time and, perhaps, over most of the past thirty years, is the phrase, "service delivery".
A boy called Service Delivery
Nothing illustrates the ubiquity of the phrase "service delivery" in South African life better than the story of a boy named Service Delivery.
In the short and nondescript street of Letsogo in Zone 8, Meadowlands, Soweto, where I grew up, there is a boy called Service Delivery Mthimkhulu. During the morning of Saturday 9 June 2012, Service Delivery was almost not born. The week ending 10 June 2012 was the culmination of a sustained period of erratic service delivery in Meadowlands - intermittent water supply, frequent electricity cuts, sporadic waste removal, and unresponsive police.
As his heavily pregnant mother was being rushed to hospital, tyre-burning and toyi-toying service-delivery protesters had blocked the main road. Only the use of detours and shortcuts between Meadowlands and Diepkloof prevented Service Delivery from being born en route to Baragwanath Hospital. In light of the service delivery incidents and accidents of the day and the times, it must have seemed evident to the Mthimkhulus, once the baby was delivered, that the only fitting name for the newborn was Service Delivery.
To this day, his parents believe that the trauma of being born during such a turbulent time may explain why Service Delivery suffers both from sporadic bouts of epilepsy and fits of violent behaviour. He is in danger of slipping into the NEET category of young people – not in education, employment or training.
A Deeply Felt Reality
Indeed, "service delivery" may not be that elegant a phrase. It is too blunt, too mundane, too basic a phrase, with nothing exotic, poetic, or philosophical about it. It describes a deeply felt reality, which has been the national rallying cry for the past 20 years. It is the most accessible shorthand for the expression of the hopes and the needs of South Africans. The problems and promises of the seven national elections held since democracy all revolved around service delivery. By the May 2024 elections, service delivery was still a potent phrase, but by then, more as a problem than a promise.
One of the most striking and repeated features of the second half of our 30-year democracy has been the phenomenon of "service delivery protests" - protests about the most basic services: jobs, houses, water and sanitation, electricity, roads, transport, and human dignity.
I am yet to see a service delivery protest because of the absence of wi-fi. And that is not to say Wi-Fi, Facebook and WhatsApp have not become "human rights" in the 21st century. It is because South African service delivery protests are about things more basic.
Armed with the National Development Plan (NDP) Vision 2030, the National Planning Commission (NPC) has been trying to understand the root causes of poor service delivery. Note has been taken of the capacity and the maintenance issues within metros, municipalities and provinces.
Similarly, note has been taken of the poor planning coordination and the incoherence between the local, provincial, and national spheres of government. The disjuncture between the promises of the NDP and our Bill of Rights is jarring. The NPC has been hard at work trying to understand the causes, effects, scale, impact of poor service delivery, as well as how to return the country to the course laid out by the NDP.
South Africans have what it takes to overcome the problems of service delivery. As a nation, we know where we ought to be going as far as service delivery is concerned. We have clear national objectives and targets. We know what needs to be done. However, we also need to understand why and how we have gone off course and why we have achieved less than what we set out to do in the first place.
Service Delivery is sick
The Meadowlands lad called Service Delivery
Mthimkhulu is growing into adolescence now. Recently, when I checked on the 13-year-old, I discovered that Service Delivery is sick - sick in the soul and sick in the body.
This brings me to the Miriam Makeba song about a sick child. Once when faced with a sick child in the house, she and her friend Dudu went looking for a sangoma.
Mthimkhulu is growing into adolescence now. Recently, when I checked on the 13-year-old, I discovered that Service Delivery is sick - sick in the soul and sick in the body.
Sahamba noDudu (off we went with Dudu)
Sayofun' isangoma (searching for a Sangoma)
Safik'isangoma sathi umtwana u ya gula (the Sangoma arrived and said the child is ill)
UMtwana uyagula (the child is ill?)
UmMtwana uyagula (the child is ill!)
Uphethwe yini naa? (What illness is troubling the child?)
The sangoma merely repeated what Miriam and Dudu already knew, asking the same questions as Miriam and Dudu had asked but providing no further analysis or cogent answers. In desperation, but without shedding any light on the problem, the sangoma eventually found someone to blame. "There is a witch in this house!" (umthakathi usendlini!) shouted the sangoma.
The national dialogue on the state of service delivery intended to do more than merely regurgitate what is known. The dialogue intended to do more than find someone to blame. At the dialogue, the root causes were probed, and frameworks for lasting solutions were sought. I am glad to confirm that the dialogue achieved all these and more.
But alas! Service Delivery is sick in Soweto and elsewhere. We must probe beyond the symptoms. We dare not let Service Delivery down.
Service delivery is the single most important conversation in South Africa today, apart from Donald Trump.