There is an old South African joke that municipalities are expected to do everything except control the weather.
Yet when it rains and the storm floods the roads, cuts electricity and uproots trees, residents often ask: “What is the municipality doing about the rain?”
That question, amusing as it may be, captures one of the great paradoxes of local government.
Municipal governance is perhaps the most sophisticated and complex arena of public leadership, yet it is frequently reduced to naive narratives, political soundbites and social media verdicts delivered from the comfort of a keyboard.
A municipality is at once a government, a business, a planner, a regulator, a developer, a community builder and an emergency responder.
It has to balance political mandates, legal obligations, financial constraints and citizen expectations, often all before breakfast.
Picture, for a moment, the city manager or executive sitting down on a Monday morning.
On the agenda: a power outage, a labour dispute, a court application, an unfunded infrastructure backlog, a councillor demanding urgent intervention, an auditor seeking evidence, and residents asking why potholes have not yet been repaired.
Before lunch, there is likely a social media storm.
By sunset, a real storm.
This is the “never-normal” environment of local government.
One myth is that municipal success depends only on technical competence.
Of course, engineering, finance and governance matter.
But technical skills and knowledge alone are no longer sufficient in this era of “never-normal municipal governance.
The modern local government leader requires a different set of muscles.
The first is what I call adaptive resilience. Leaders must make decisions in the face of uncertainty, conflicting priorities and ambiguity.
There is rarely a right or wrong decision but that there are always better or worse options.
The second is political intelligence.
Contrary to popular belief, politics is not a nuisance to governance; it is a critical aspect of democratic governance.
Effective leaders understand how to navigate politics without being beholden to it.
The third is systems thinking.
Every municipal challenge is interconnected. Local government leaders must deal with complex policy and programmatic issues that cut across multiple departments and sectors.
They must always as the question: how will my proposed solution impact the system?
Leaders who treat problems in isolation often discover that they have merely relocated them.
Then comes perhaps the most unappreciated leadership muscle: emotional stamina.
Municipal leaders operate at the intersection of infinite expectations and finite resources.
They must accept criticism, manage anxiety and continue making difficult decisions.
It is the equivalent of being a referee in a football match where everyone in the stadium believes they can do a better job.
There is this prevailing view in many quarters that municipalities are failing because all officials simply do not care.
Certainly, poor governance exists and accountability must remain non-negotiable.
This pervasive narrative that all municipal officials do not care is not sustained by evidence.
It ignores the many thousands who quietly go about their jobs, often under difficult circumstances. The reality is more nuanced than either the critics or defenders care to admit.
A further fallacy is that municipalities can solve every social challenge.
They cannot.
Local government exists within a broader ecosystem of national departments, provincial governments, state-owned entities, businesses and communities.
When that ecosystem under performs, municipalities often become the visible face of that collective failure.
Perhaps the biggest single challenge facing local government today is rebuilding trust.
Municipal leaders need to restore faith in democratic governance and convince communities that they can deliver on priorities with the constraints inherent in the system.
Local government leaders, in turn, need to have the confidence and courage to acknowledge shortcomings while at the same being unrelenting in their efforts to improve outcomes.
The future of local government belongs to leaders who can contend with sophistication and complexity without being paralysed by it.
Leaders who can think strategically but are not afraid to get their hands dirty.
It demands leaders who can navigate the minefield of politics while remaining committed to public service. It needs leaders who can inspire confidence and hope, even in the darkest times.
And perhaps that is why local government remains one of the hardest jobs in public life.
Not because it is broken, but because it sits exactly where democracy becomes real and where everyone has an opinion.
Including, of course, the person asking what the municipality plans to do about the rain!
Luncedo Njezula, SALGA executive manager in the office of the CEO, writing in his private capacity
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