Municipal power struggles are driving political killings in South Africa

Local government in South Africa has become a battleground for control of public resources, and that struggle for money and influence is increasingly turning deadly. Competing interests inside municipalities, and within political parties, have driven a pattern of violence that undermines service delivery and democratic processes.

Why municipal posts matter

In many municipalities, holding political office is viewed not simply as public service but as a gateway to accessing municipal financial resources. Whoever holds authority can determine whether funds are used to deliver services or diverted for rent-seeking and personal gain. That dynamic has fuelled intense competition between political opponents and, in some cases, escalated into violent attempts to eliminate rivals.

Scope and scale of the problem

The 2024 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime recorded 186 politically motivated assassinations across South Africa’s election years since 2000. Of those, 56% (105) occurred during municipal elections, while 44% (81) took place in national and provincial contests. These figures point to a concentrated crisis at local level and to how deeply crime has become entangled with politics.

Examples of deadly consequences

The deadly toll is illustrated by high‑profile cases from 2017. In July that year, former ANC Youth League secretary‑general and uMzimkhulu councillor Sindiso Magaqa was assassinated amid his anti‑corruption stance over municipal fund misuse. In the same month, Raymond Mhlaba Local Municipality speaker Thozama Njobe was also assassinated; she had spoken out against wrongdoing at council level.

More recently, the killings of activists Thato Molosankwe and Mokoena Letsie in the North West, and the deaths of Cape Town DA ward councillor candidate Sinovuyo Dyokwe and ANC ward councillor Sicelo Mleve in Nelson Mandela Bay, show that political intolerance and lethal contests for control persist.

How party patronage feeds violence

Intraparty patronage creates and entrenches factions, the source explains, particularly within the ANC. Elective conferences at regional, provincial and national levels are viewed as mechanisms to install collectives who then get deployed into government. That deployment, the article says, can create networks that enable extraction of state resources for party loyalists through procurement and other channels. Those networks, in turn, make political office a prize worth fighting over sometimes by eliminating opponents who threaten access to those resources.

Paths toward preventing political killings

Addressing these killings requires a multiperspective approach, the article argues. That includes tackling systemic problems in municipalities’ financial ecosystems and improving intragovernmental relations between politicians and administrators. It also calls on politicians to adopt a stronger moral compass and a people‑centred approach to the distribution of public resources.

Until those structural drivers are addressed, the politicisation of municipal resources is likely to remain a core factor in violence that both costs lives and corrodes local democracy.