The national government is finalising an administrative interim framework to guide hung municipal councils after Parliament confirmed the Local Government: Municipal Structures Amendment Bill will not pass before the 4 November 2026 local government elections. With statutory reforms stranded in committee, incoming councillors will navigate post-election negotiations without legally enforceable coalition contracts, leaving ratepayers exposed to another cycle of unstable alliances and contested mayoral removals.
The proposed statute, colloquially known as the Coalition Bill, was designed to end the volatility that paralysed major metropolitans following the 2021 municipal polls. The bill sought to make written coalition agreements mandatory and legally binding, enforce a 1% electoral threshold for council seat qualification, and restrict motions of no confidence to specified annual intervals. However, because the draft constitutes a Section 76 bill affecting provinces, it requires comprehensive public hearings across all nine provincial legislatures and formal processing through the National Council of Provinces. Rushing those constitutional steps would expose the resulting legislation to immediate judicial invalidation under established Constitutional Court precedent.
Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, chaired by Dr Zweli Mkhize, acknowledged the legislative calendar had run out. Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa and Deputy Minister Dickson Masemola have turned instead to an interim advisory framework. This administrative stopgap intends to supply political parties with standard dispute-resolution templates, rules for coalition secretariats, and guidelines for appointing municipal managers. Yet because it lacks the force of primary statute, the framework remains purely voluntary.
The constitutional hurdle facing the executive framework lies in Section 160(3) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. That section guarantees that all council decisions, barring specified budget and by-law votes, are decided by a simple majority of votes cast by attending councillors. Furthermore, Section 58 of the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act explicitly authorises any municipal council to remove an executive mayor by resolution after notice of intention. An executive advisory guideline cannot override primary statutory rights or constitutional voting entitlements. If two coalition partners sign a voluntary pact agreeing to refrain from motions of no confidence, any individual councillor retains the lawful right to break rank and table a removal motion.
The South African Local Government Association attempted a similar voluntary approach in 2021, partnering with the Dullah Omar Institute to issue coalition management guidelines. That voluntary framework collapsed in practice. Political parties routinely disregarded non-binding principles whenever tactical opportunities arose to unseat mayors. Metropolitans such as the City of Johannesburg, the City of Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, and Nelson Mandela Bay witnessed perpetual executive turnover, with micro-parties holding as few as two seats installed into mayoral chains as leverage in multi-party bargaining. Without statutory thresholds, single-seat parties will once again hold kingmaker power across dozens of councils in November 2026.
Civil society organizations have warned that voluntary guidelines fail to address the core driver of municipal collapse: opacity. Civic monitoring group My Vote Counts has insisted that all coalition agreements must be published in full before governments are formed. The organization argued that secret political deals undermine democratic accountability and hide patronage trades, while cautioning that statutory thresholds must not be set so high that they silence legitimate community representation. The absence of passed legislation means none of these disclosure requirements are legally enforceable when ballots are counted.
Electoral projections indicate that more than 70 municipal councils will produce hung results in November 2026, up from 66 in 2021. For residents and businesses, the collapse of the statutory timetable means local governance will remain fragile. In hung councils governed by voluntary pacts, mayoral terms can end on 14 days notice through backroom deals, freezing capital expenditure and disrupting water, electricity, and road maintenance contracts. Service delivery continuity depends entirely on political self-restraint rather than statutory law.
* Can voluntary executive guidelines bring stability to hung councils if political parties can abandon signed agreements without legal penalty?
* Why did national government delay the tabling of the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill until the parliamentary calendar made passage before November 2026 impossible?
* Will political parties voluntarily publish their coalition agreements and mayoral power-sharing terms to ensure voter transparency before the ballots are cast?