THE EFF HAS POSITIONED ITSELF AS A SERIUOS FORCE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT: BY DIAGNOSIS AND IMPLEMENTATION

Lesego Mahlangu

By Lesego Mahlangu
City of Tshwane Researcher (Personal opinion)

Somewhere in South Africa right now, a child has missed a vaccination that should have been routine.

Not because a parent refused, but because no one in the system knew to look for them.

This is not a slogan.

It is a silent crisis unfolding in our neighbourhoods.

It is what happens when Early Childhood Development (ECD) and primary health care, two arms of the state meant to hold our children, drift apart instead of working as one.

We rarely make these connection in public debate, but it is time we understand how government works.

When ECD infrastructure fails to absorb children, the state loses the trail.

In South Africa, this sector is still overwhelmingly informal, run out of backyards and unregistered structures. Because these children are not in formal, subsidised facilities, they are not counted.

And because they are not counted, they are not immunized they are not protected.

This is not a hypothetical concern.

National immunisation coverage is falling short of global benchmarks.

The number of “zero-dose” children, those who have received no immunisations at all, is rising in every province, urban and rural alike.

Community health care, the layer meant to catch this early, is flying blind because so many of these children were never logged into a system built to leave them uncounted.

While other parties offer gimmicks for the amusement of “those who pay,” for votes this is where the EFF’s diagnosis of local government departs sharply from the rest.

Where others treat local government as a transactional relationship, services rendered in proportion to rates paid, the EFF understands it as a platform for universal service delivery in service of an inclusive developmental agenda.

That distinction is not academic.

It is the difference between a municipality that finds missing children, and one that never notices they are missing at all.

What the Conversation Has Been About

Local government election discourse often reveals the true ideological framework of politicians and political parties.

Over the past few months, the conversation has been dominated by a narrow set of concerns: water outages, electricity disruptions, and potholes.

These are real issues. No one denies the frustration of a dry tap or a dark home.

But what has been striking is how these issues have been framed, and whose voices have been centred in the debate.

The primary irritants driving the discourse have been the irritations of a cosmopolitan middle class.

This is a class that has historically experienced local government as a functional service provider, one that responds when they call, one that fixes what they complain about.

Their frustration is real, but it is also new.

They are now discovering what the majority of poor communities have always known: that local government in South Africa has never truly operated on the principle of universal provision.

It has operated on the principle of who can pay, who can complain, and who can demand.

The middle class is now battling a thinning pocket.

The cost of living is rising faster than salaries. Debt is mounting.

Savings are shrinking. And so, for the first time in many of their lives, they are beginning to experience local government the way poor communities have always experienced it: having to beg for everything.

Having to plead for a response.

Having to wait in queues for services that should be automatic. Having to be ignored.

This is a new and uncomfortable reality for many, and it has shaped the public conversation in a particular way.

The framing has become transactional.

The demand has become “we pay, therefore we deserve.”

The underlying assumption is that those who pay rates and taxes should be prioritised, and those who cannot pay should wait their turn.

But this framing misses something fundamental.

It misses the idea that local government is not a business. It is not a service provider contracted by those who can afford it.

It is the first line of defence for a community.

It is the primary pillar of an inclusive developmental state.

When we reduce local government to a transactional relationship between the state and the ratepayer, we abandon the very idea of universal service delivery.

We abandon the idea that every person, regardless of their ability to pay, is entitled to dignity, to health, to safety, and to a future.

What the Conversation Has Missed

This is precisely why some of the most crucial provisions of local government keep falling out of the urgency of current discourse. Primary health care.

Early childhood development. The protection of vulnerable people, particularly children.

These are constitutional mandates.

They are written into the very fabric of what local government is supposed to be.

And yet they barely make a headline.

Why? Because they do not irritate the cosmopolitan middle class in the same way a pothole does.

Because they do not disrupt the morning commute or the evening routine of those who have the loudest voices.

Because they affect the poor, the marginalised, and the voiceless.

And in a discourse dominated by those who are newly discovering the pain of being ignored, the pain of those who have always been ignored is once again pushed to the back of the queue.

The Hammanskraal water crisis is a case in point. For years, the residents of Hammanskraal lived with unsafe, inconsistent water.

This was a slow, deliberate sabotage of local health.

It did not make national headlines because it was happening to poor people.

It only became “news” when it became undeniable, when the scale of the failure could no longer be hidden.

But by then, the damage had been done.

Lives had been lost.

Health had been destroyed.

And the same pattern repeats itself across the country, in every municipality where poor communities are treated as an afterthought.

The EFF has never accepted this framing.

The EFF has consistently argued that local government must act as a first line of defence to advance inclusive growth for all.

This means water and electricity, yes.

But it also means health care.

It means early childhood development.

It means waste management.

It means all the services that determine whether a community thrives or merely survives.

The EFF understands that you cannot build a just society by prioritising those who pay and neglecting those who cannot.

You build a just society by ensuring that everyone gets what they need to live with dignity, regardless of their bank balance.

Putting the Diagnosis into Practice

Look at how the EFF governs, and you see the theory in action.

In Ekurhuleni, the EFF’s own account of its tenure under MMC Thembi Msane treats water infrastructure as more than a pipes-and-pressure issue.

It is framed as a foundation for public health and economic security, reducing losses, expanding storage, and stabilising supply to households and industry alike.

This is work the party credits with protecting jobs along the way.

The framing itself is the point: water treated as a first line of defence for community health, not a luxury funded once the “real” services are covered.

That same commitment is displayed by Primary Healthcare EFF deplyees of the EFF in City of Tshwane and City of Johannesburg.

Councillors Ennie Makhafola and Tshegofatso Mashabela, EFF MMCs went on record against the unjust practice of turning clinic gates into informal border posts.

They insisted that health access rooted in prevention and universality, not documentation status, is what both the Constitution and basic public health logic demand.

That is community health treated as infrastructure that has to stay open and preventive by design, not something you can means-test at the door without the whole system paying for it later.

And in Tshwane’s environment and agriculture portfolio, MMC Obakeng Ramabodu’s Q3 2025/26 report shows the department at 90% overall performance against its 29 key indicators.

Full waste collection coverage exists in both informal settlements and formal suburbs alike, and capital expenditure is running at 91% against a 50% target.

Waste management here is not a “keep the city pretty” exercise. It is a determinant of community health, a plank of prevention-first governance rather than a courtesy extended only to areas that pay their rates on time.

The Missing Child and the Data Trail
Perhaps the most powerful example of this philosophy in action is the Early Childhood Development Waiver introduced in Tshwane.

On paper, it reads like a modest fee-relief measure.

In practice, it is the beginning of formalising a sector that has spent years operating in the shadows of local government’s own record-keeping.

Follow the logic: a child enrolled in a registered, subsidised ECD centre is a child local government actually knows exists.

A child in an unregistered backyard facility, often because the formal route was too expensive or too bureaucratically hostile to reach, is a child who can vanish from every system meant to protect them, immunisation records included.

When ECD lives almost entirely in the informal sector, local government is not just under-funding early learning.

It is cutting the very data trail that would tell it who has been vaccinated, who has not, and who needs to be found before it is too late.

The waiver, by lowering the barrier to formal enrolment, is a quiet but real intervention into exactly that gap.

It is local government starting to behave like the coordinated, intrusive developmental state the Constitution actually asks it to be, where ECD and primary health care are not managed in separate silos but as two arms of the same job: keeping every child accounted for, not just the easy-to-reach ones.

This is also the clearest way to understand what MMC Makhafola AND MMC Mashabela were actually defending when they rejected the “clinics as border posts” framing. That was not a paperwork dispute.

It was a rejection of the underlying premise, pushed by those demanding clinics be “reserved” for tax-paying citizens, that local government’s obligations should scale with who pays.

Their argument cuts the other way: local government is not a transaction between the state and the ratepayer.

It is a relationship between the state and the community.

A community’s health does not come in separable portions.

An unvaccinated child, whoever their parents are, wherever they were born, is a public health risk to every child standing next to them in the queue.

You cannot protect “your own” kids by turning away someone else’s at the clinic door. Prevention does not check anyone’s rates account first.

The Throughline

Put the ECD Waiver, the refusal to gatekeep clinics by citizenship, and the insistence on universal waste and water coverage next to each other, and you are not looking at a string of lucky coincidences.

You are looking at a manifesto commitment showing its working, local government as a site of job creation, insourcing, and expanded free basic services for all.

Municipalities rebuilt as developmental institutions rather than patronage machines.

Health, ECD, water, waste, different departments, led by the same instinct to ensure that development is treated as something owed to a community not a reward earned by a household’s ability to pay.

The mainstream conversation may continue to revolve around potholes and the frustrations of a newly vulnerable middle class.

But the EFF is not interested in being the party of the moment.

It is interested in being the party of the future.

A future where every child is counted, every clinic is open, every tap runs, and every community is served. That is the radical difference.

It is the difference between a government that services the privileged and a government that serves the people.

The EFF has positioned itself as a serious force for local government by diagnosis and, more importantly, by implementation.

The evidence is mounting. The choice is clear.