NKOSANA THOBELA | Service delivery means knowing where every cent is spent

South Africans have been taught to judge government performance by the most visible signs: whether refuse is collected, taps run, streetlights work and potholes are patched. These are important municipal services, but they represent only a small portion of what citizens pay for.

Every rand collected in tax is meant to serve the public not only through local amenities but also through safety, health care, education, infrastructure, economic opportunity and capable governance. When service delivery is reduced to municipal basics, accountability collapses everywhere else.

South Africa collects more than R1.7-trillion in tax revenue each year. That money does not fund municipalities alone. It sustains national departments, provincial administrations, courts, police services, hospitals, regulators, state-owned companies and skills institutions that shape the country’s long-term prospects. Yet public anger and scrutiny remain overwhelmingly focused on local government, while systemic failures at national level often escape sustained pressure.

Policing is a clear example. The South African Police Service consumes one of the largest portions of national expenditure, yet violent crime remains stubbornly high, detective capacity is under strain, forensic backlogs persist and public trust continues to erode. These are not abstract policy problems. They reflect a breakdown in one of the state’s most basic obligations: protecting life and property. Citizens are paying for safety. The system is not delivering it.

Health care tells a similar story. Taxpayers fund hospitals, clinics, laboratories, emergency services and medicine supply chains. When facilities run out of essential medication, equipment remains broken for months or ambulances arrive too late. These are not unfortunate mishaps; they are failures in the delivery of services people have already paid for.

Education exposes perhaps the most damaging gap between spending and outcomes. South Africa allocates a significant share of GDP to education, yet learning outcomes remain weak. The widely reported finding that most grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning is not simply an embarrassment for the sector; it is a service delivery failure with generational consequences. Citizens are not paying for administrative compliance. They are paying for results.

Until executives, boards and senior officials face tangible personal risk for mismanagement, dysfunction will remain rational behaviour inside the system

Infrastructure failures further illustrate how narrowly service delivery has been defined. Collapsed rail systems, congested ports, unreliable electricity and failing logistics networks have constrained economic growth for years. These are not municipal issues. They are national service delivery failures that quietly destroy jobs, discourage investment and weaken competitiveness.

There is also an uncomfortable but necessary truth in current public debates: large numbers of undocumented foreign nationals do place considerable pressure on already strained public services such as health care, housing and policing. But this, too, is ultimately a failure of the state. Border management, migration policy, enforcement capacity and long-term population planning are core government responsibilities. The burden on public resources is therefore not the fault of vulnerable individuals seeking survival but the predictable consequence of weak policy execution, poor co-ordination and the absence of effective state control.

Accountability itself is also a public service. Institutions such as the auditor-general, courts, oversight bodies and chapter 9 institutions exist to safeguard public resources and lawful governance. When these institutions are weakened, ignored or undermined, corruption becomes easier and mismanagement is normalised. The cost is paid by ordinary citizens through broken services, stalled development and declining trust.

Nowhere is systemic dysfunction clearer than in the skills development system. Sector education and training authorities (Setas) are funded by compulsory levies paid by workers and employers. Their mandate is to build the country’s workforce. Yet Services Seta, Construction Seta and several others have for years been plagued by instability, misgovernance and inefficiency. Billions meant to produce artisans, technicians and professionals have been poorly accounted for or wasted. A culture of “tick-box compliance”, where paperwork satisfies formal requirements while real outcomes remain absent or minimal, has become entrenched across too many state-controlled entities.

The result is visible: persistent skills shortages alongside mass unemployment. This is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of systemic service delivery failure in institutions designed to prepare the workforce of the future.

So what can be done?

First, public accountability must expand beyond municipalities. Civil society, media, business formations and community organisations must deliberately redirect pressure towards national departments, regulators and state entities where the largest budgets sit. Citizens should demand regular, understandable public reporting on outcomes from institutions such as the police, health, transport, home affairs, Setas and the like.

Second, consequence management must become non-negotiable. Adverse audit findings, procurement breaches and governance failures should trigger real professional and legal consequences. Until executives, boards and senior officials face tangible personal risk for mismanagement, dysfunction will remain rational behaviour inside the system.

Third, transparency must be radically improved. Budgets, performance dashboards, procurement data and institutional scorecards should be made accessible to the public in plain language. A society cannot hold its government accountable if information remains buried in technical reports that only specialists can interpret. Service delivery is everything the state does with taxpayers’ money, not only the visible parts.

If South Africa is to rebuild institutional capability and public trust, the national conversation must mature. A healthy democracy is not one where citizens merely complain about broken taps, but one where they insist, relentlessly and informedly, on knowing where every cent goes and what it delivers in return.

• Thobela is executive director at The BPI Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity