The Seeds of Perpetual Instability: The Case of Mogalakwena Local Municipality in South Africa

In this article, we employ an in-depth institutional focus to reassess the state of South Africa’s ‘fragile stability’ under the Zuma administration. We look within a troubled local municipality in Limpopo province in a bid to update the diagnosis proffered by Beall et al. in 2005. This case casts some of the predictions they made in more pessimistic terms. Beall et al. insisted that ‘collapse and social disintegration’ were ‘unlikely’, owing to the building of strong institutions after the transition from apartheid. Today, we argue, signs of collapse have in fact started to emerge in various parts of the institutional fabric of the state. We contend that Mogalakwena local municipality is in the grip of ‘perpetual instability’, with routine and competing political intrusions, resulting in an entrenched spiral of institutional damage, rising securitisation, protest and violence – each of which reinforces the other. This situation is ‘perpetual’ because it is underpinned by the recurrent and hastening splintering of the African National Congress (ANC), intensifying factionalism over which the party has largely lost control, and which has turned institutions of state into conflictual battlegrounds. Existing administrative protections are unable to buffer the damage caused to the functioning of state institutions by deepening political contests. We conclude by considering the dramatic developments that captured national attention during the Zuma administration, and suggest that Mogalakwena brings into relief patterns of instability that have emerged at other levels of state and society.