THE BEST-RUN GOVERNMENT IN BALLITO ISN’T ON THE BALLOT

Three weeks before the municipal elections: who actually runs the North Coast, and the water decision the next council cannot dodge.

Ashley Gittins  ·  Gittins Attorneys Inc.  ·  Johannesburg  ·  Ballito  ·  www.gittins.co.za

On Wednesday 4 November 2026 South Africa elects its municipal councils. On the North Coast, an awkward truth sits under that date: most of what works in your day is run by people you never voted for. The gate that lifts when you get home. The verges and streetlights along Ballito Drive. The water in this morning’s kettle. Estate, precinct, concession. None of them is on the ballot.

The private government you already live in

If you live in an estate, you live under a constitution you agreed to the day you bought. The Supreme Court of Appeal said as much in a case from our own province, Mount Edgecombe Country Club Estate Management Association II v Singh 2019 (4) SA 471 (SCA): buy into an estate and you become a member of its association, and that relationship is a contract. It is why a 40 km/h limit on estate roads is enforceable against members although no traffic authority set it. The same litigation also saw three of that estate’s rules on domestic workers — restricting their hours and where they could walk — declared unlawful. That is the other half of the bargain: a private government is bound by its own contract, and a court will read it.

Outside the gates, the Ballito UIP is a special rating area under the Municipal Property Rates Act 6 of 2004: every owner inside the precinct pays an additional rate on the municipal bill, which the municipality collects and hands to a non-profit company that tops up what the municipality provides — cleaning, patrols, upkeep.

Then there is the water. Since 1999 the communities between the Tongaat and Umvoti rivers — Zimbali, Ballito, Salt Rock, Sheffield Beach, Tinley Manor and the settlements inland — have had their water and sanitation delivered under South Africa’s first water concession: a 30-year agreement the old Borough of Dolphin Coast signed with Siza Water, then led by France’s Saur group and today South African-owned. A 2025 case study on the provincial Treasury’s PPP programme puts water losses in the concession area at between 8% and 15% by 2021, against 39% for the district as a whole in 2023/24. It has kept the taps running for 27 years, which in this province is no small thing. It runs out early in 2029.

The 2029 question

In September last year the iLembe District Municipality’s own manager tabled a section 78 assessment — the process under the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act 32 of 2000 that a council must run before deciding whether a service is delivered in-house or by an outside provider. Council unanimously rejected it and resolved to extend the concession instead, under a Municipal Finance Management Act provision that allows existing contracts to be amended. In April the KZN Finance MEC wrote to the municipality: that provision permits limited amendments, not a new long-term arrangement; the proposed extension might be unlawful, irregular and open to challenge; and the section 78 assessment had to start at once. At last public report, council was still deciding whether to.

Section 78 is not red tape. It requires the municipality first to assess its own capacity and then, if it wants to look outside, to give notice to the local community, weigh the options against the community’s views and commission a feasibility study; section 80 adds a programme of community consultation before any external agreement is signed. And under the Water Services Act 108 of 1997 iLembe remains the water services authority whoever runs the pipes. In the Siza bulk-water tariff litigation, which ended in the Constitutional Court in Minister of Water and Sanitation v Sembcorp Siza Water 2023 (1) SA 1 (CC), the courts treated Siza as performing a public function on iLembe’s behalf; the municipality’s constitutional responsibilities do not vanish because a contractor performs them. That case cuts the other way too: the Court upheld Umgeni Water’s decision to stop cross-subsidising Siza’s bulk water while municipalities kept the subsidy, leaving the concession with a far steeper increase. Private provision has commercial consequences. A concession is not a free lunch.

The councils elected on 4 November sit for five years. The 2029 decision — extend lawfully, re-tender, or take the service back — lands inside that term. If the municipality looks beyond its own staff, section 78 obliges it to notify the community and weigh residents’ views, and any new external agreement triggers section 80’s consultation. It deserves far more attention in this campaign than it is getting. You should be asking about it.

The public one

Across the N2, KwaDukuza Local Municipality — one of the two councils you will vote for on 4 November; the other is the iLembe District Council, which holds the water decision — has had a bruising two years. In January 2025, R35.7 million left its bank account in a 45-minute cyber-theft; most has been recovered, and the Hawks are still investigating. In February this year the municipal manager and two executive directors were placed on precautionary suspension after a section 106 forensic investigation commissioned by the provincial Cogta MEC, and a second section 106 investigation is now under way. In July the mayor signed an integrity pledge. By September the council and the province were disagreeing in public over whether the appointment of the acting municipal manager was even lawful.

None of that is a party point; the parties will make their own. Precautionary suspensions are not findings of guilt, and the municipality says it has won every court challenge to them. It is a capacity point — and capacity is what the 2029 argument is about. The province’s view is that the law requires it to be measured, not assumed.

What you can do, and the one thing you can’t

Start with the can’t. Withholding rates in protest feels like leverage; legally it is a gun pointed at your own feet. In Rademan v Moqhaka Local Municipality 2013 (4) SA 225 (CC) a Kroonstad ratepayer, fed up with service delivery, stopped paying rates but kept her electricity account current. The municipality cut her lights anyway, and the Constitutional Court held that it could: a municipal account is consolidated, so an unpaid rates component puts the whole of it in arrears. Nobody can be made to pay for a service that is not delivered — but rates are not a service. They are a tax on owning the property. The Systems Act does protect a ratepayer who disputes a specific amount through the municipality’s own dispute procedures; a general grievance about service delivery is not that.

What you can do is more interesting. In Kgetlengrivier Concerned Citizens v Kgetlengrivier Local Municipality (UM 271/2020, North West High Court, Mahikeng, 18 December 2020) the court declared that a municipality had failed in its constitutional duty to supply drinking water and was fouling two rivers with raw sewage, and authorised a residents’ association to take over the water and sewage works if the failures were not fixed within days. They were not. The residents took over, and within days the taps ran clear. The arrangement was later unwound and the dispute has been through the courts ever since — so treat it as a lifeboat the law will sometimes launch, not a model of government.

Between those poles sit the remedies that actually work: a properly motivated request for provincial intervention under section 139 of the Constitution; review of unlawful decisions; and a ratepayers’ body that is formally constituted, properly represented and in the room when the section 78 process starts.

Read the small print before you vote

The North Coast has, without quite deciding to, built a second government out of contracts: estate constitutions, precinct funding agreements, a water concession. Contracts are our trade. If you are a homeowner at odds with your estate, a business losing trading days to outages, a developer negotiating bulk services, or a ratepayers’ association that wants a seat at the table when the 2029 question is decided, our Ballito office at Simbithi Verve is up the road.

Vote on 4 November. Read your contracts first.