More and more, contemporary warfare takes place in supermarkets, tower blocks, subway tunnels, and industrial districts rather than open fields, jungles or deserts.
Stephen Graham
It was becoming increasingly clear to me that terrible things happen when our leaders fail to think about data that are outside their typical focus.
Max Bazerman
Introduction, and the general thesis of the article
South African cities and towns have been on the receiving end of the most abject service delivery performances for decades now. Even the most basic of such services - water, electricity, transport and safe roads, security and law enforcement – have all become subject to insecure delivery and political manipulation. What we would presume to be non-contentious rights to be accessed effortlessly and reliably on a daily basis have become flashpoints and cyclical conflicts in our wider unresolved urban conflicts. All of our cities and so many of our town are affected, with only the degree of such dysfunction really setting them apart.
Our popular and social media detail, on a daily basis, the scandalous levels of service delivery failures by municipal leadership in Johannesburg, Tshwane, Gqeberha and a long list of other cities and towns. The reasons for these failures are nearly as long a list as is the list of failures themselves, with everything from financial constraints, poor leadership, corruption to a variety of socioeconomic reasons used to explain or ameliorate these events.
Most of us complain, blame the other side(s) and speak of hope of better days at the next elections. The new leaders, our people, will ensure reliable water, electricity, safety and security, and all those services and rights that we should not be begging for. This article agrees that democratic elections can certainly improve these service delivery scandals, but argues further that elections are increasingly limited tools in the fight for stability and justice in service delivery conflicts.
Other conflict strategies exist, and will have to be integrated into our community activism and everyday responses to these continued leadership failures. Ultimately, we will need to take responsibility for the delivery of these services. The article sets out a few practical conflict strategies that individuals and communities can begin to implement in their local service delivery campaigns.
Democratic elections: a limited common good
It is good that we rely on democratic change for the improvement of these important conflicts in our lives. Good leadership makes a difference, as many municipalities will bear out. But should democratic elections really be our only, or even main, remedy for these problems?
If it is, why are we having this debate more than thirty years after the start of those democratic elections? When only 58,64% of eligible South African voters voted in the hotly contested 2024 general elections, and when local elections show eligible voters turning out in the 40s and 50s percentages, and with voter apathy, mis- and disinformation campaigns bringing new meaning to elections establishing the will of the people, elections are, at best, irregular and unreliable mechanisms to place our trust in.
Add to this the increasing reality of enforced coalition politics and the inexperience and conflict ineptness that our political leaders show in this highly technical arena, and elections become a thin thread to hang our hopes from. Vote we must, but is this our only, or best, conflict strategy?
Modern urban conflict strategies
If democratic elections are not our main or only remedy, what other legal, non-violent options do we have? Conflict studies from a comparative and global perspective offer us a range of proven, effective alternative or supplementary strategies to combat these leadership failures. While each of these may require a specifically designed assessment and strategy, the following brief list gives the reader an idea of some of these conflict options available to us.
i. Legal protests and focused campaigning
South Africa has a proud tradition of effective legal protest campaigns, but a variety of modern factors and a general sense of apathy and low confidence in our own agency have watered this tradition down to sporadic and localised events, often lasting a few hours. These events are simply isolated and managed for their brief duration by authorities, and the moment passes with the current news cycle. Larger, more co-ordinated and sustained campaigns should be carefully planned and executed, with a consciously engineered media presence and reach, and such campaigns should include further costs to the offending parties in leadership, such as the withholding of support, votes and so on. Several effective models exist globally. For this to become effective, civic awareness, capacity building, resources and coordinated multi-stakeholder partnerships must be developed and rolled out.
ii. Civil society and community engagement
Individuals and communities must improve their partnerships with NGOs, faith-based communities and other activists to improve oversight and advocacy. Accountability comes from close monitoring and consequence management on a regular, sustained basis, not just when we are facing elections or when we experience a water crisis like in Johannesburg. Practical measurements such as community scorecards and interventions are available to conflict competent communities, with Honduras and Brazil providing excellent real world examples of what is possible.
iii. Develop transparency and information initiatives
Accessing available government data and selected progress monitoring points can keep track of inefficiencies, broken promises and progress reports, creating constructive early warning systems and feedback loops. India’s right-to-information campaigns significantly reduced corruption in welfare programs, as one global model. In South Africa the Promotion of Access to Information Act provides a point of departure for similar results, although other, more efficient remedies are also available.
iv. Build and develop accountability mechanisms
The absence of such accountability mechanisms have a twofold negative result for citizens. It firstly allows a crisis such as the poor electricity infrastructure maintenance in Gqeberha or the water crisis in Johannesburg to develop and reach crisis proportions, and secondly, it leads to cycles where easy promises are allowed to lead to further delays, inefficiencies and even worse service delivery failures. Comparable case studies in Kenya, Guinea, Afghanistan and Colombia show the development and successful use of tools like complaint systems, citizen feedback loops, audits and community report cards. Accountability and consequences for responsible leaders must be established.
v. Digital participation tools
Live feedback and reporting systems can easily be created, maintained and expanded in an organised manner. Low technical and digital availability and ability can easily be countered by assigning specific individuals in a group or community to implement these mechanisms. Globally we find that hybrid systems, combining digital and in-person reporting and feedback systems deliver the best outcomes. This strategy is normally combined with other feedback and accountability systems.
vi. Public participation in planning and decision-making
This has become a very apparent urban conflict mistake perpetuated by South African activists and communities. Action is taken after the crisis has developed, or when crisis management is called for. The lobbying, negotiation or legal enforcement, as the case may be, for much earlier public participation in the planning and decision-making processes of appropriate matters of communal interests should be developed as a primary strategy, and has become standard practice in several global urban conflict environments. When successfully implemented this prevents, or minimizes, communities having to deal with the adverse results of poor decisions which often is an unnecessarily difficult task.
vii. Legal challenges and enforcement
Despite several successes by communities and organizations in enforcing their rights through litigation such as review processes, class actions and constitutional challenges (through the use of s152 of the Constitution, for instance), this remedy may very well have to be used with greater regularity and precision, at least for a while. As expensive and risky as this may be, it is often one of the only conflict tools that local governments and municipalities respond to. Used in conjunction with other strategies, this can be a very effective enforcement tool. At the time of writing this, the Democratic Alliance, for example, is contemplating legal action to remedy the Johannesburg water crisis. Tactical litigation can be made affordable and efficient through the use of strategies discussed earlier, such as partnerships and collaborations.
viii. Influence effective coalitions
Given recent trajectories of political parties in the national elections, coalitions have become more of an everyday political reality, including municipal coalitions. When understood and used correctly, political coalitions can be powerful engines of growth and progress. As it is, however, our generally conflict incompetent politicians, trying to manage these complex process based on nothing but partisanship and severely outdated conflict principles, have turned these coalitions into further conflict causes and reasons for poor service delivery. Citizens and communities can educate themselves in understanding the power of urban conflict in general, and coalition politics in particular, and then lobby and influence their candidates to make more efficient use of this potentially powerful modern conflict tool.
ix. Take a comprehensive, scientific approach to community activism
Too often, and for understandable reasons, our best intentions and efforts at bringing about meaningful and lasting change become dissipated over time, or bring about promises and short-term benefits without reaching and affecting the actual conflict causes. Urban conflict studies have made a comprehensive, scientific roadmap available to us to deal with modern urban conflicts, of which these service delivery disasters are a specific subset.
My latest book (Skylines: the modern urban conflict manual) deals with this in great detail. Individuals and communities can effectively and quickly teach themselves to understand conflict itself, to become skilled in practical conflict strategies like community building, resource application, partnership and coalition building, persuasion and negotiation skills, community mediation, conflict escalation, effective protesting and the use of modern conflict tools such as comprehensive conflict analysis maps, artificial intelligence, and a range of others.
Such a comprehensive approach causes a sense of community continuity, these crises are addressed on an ongoing basis, far better control over progress and options can be applied, and creative solutions become apparent, or are created, by the skilled and competent use of the existing conflicts. Ironically, conflicts themselves become, in this way, the engines for progress and success. Obviously, we would like to see individual municipalities also take up this scientific approach in complying with their obligations.
Conclusion
To effectively deal with these modern urban conflicts is increasingly necessary. Infrastructure and even the most basic service delivery have become beset by incompetence, corruption, poor leadership and a range of other causes, with devastating effects on our lives and our futures. Fighting back seems the natural and right thing to do, but many of us have not yet made that mental commitment to being effective in the process of combating these problems. We do not know the power we have, we wait for our saviours to save us, we wait for the next election cycle.
Throughout all of this, for some of us, there runs a sense of unfairness. Why must we become involved in all of this? I do not believe that we have the luxury of fixing this from the sidelines any longer.
Voting remains our responsibility and our right, and we should value and responsibly use this important right, but hopefully this article has shown that we have several other powerful options available to us in this battle. Start small, start working on one or two of the above strategies, slowly form a community and expand, building one victory on the other. There are no quick fixes here, and the best people to break this cycle of harm and poor conflict outcomes are ourselves, using the conflict tools available to us.
Summary of main sources, references and suggested reading
1. My book Skylines: the modern urban conflict manual can be obtained via Amazon at Amazon.com: Skylines: The modern urban conflict manual: The modern urban conflict manual eBook : Vlok, Andre: Kindle Store , the publishers or the author directly, in ebook or hardcopy.
2. The link to a complimentary copy of the first chapter of Skylines can be found at https://www.conflict-conversations.co.za/conversations/book-excerpt-skylines-the-modern-urban-conflict-manual
3. An excellent article on the mechanics of service delivery by John Bester can be accessed at Making Dysfunctional Municipalities Functional: Towards a Framework for Improving Municipal Service Delivery Performance in South African Municipalities
4. For pertinent information on public participation at planning level, see Embedding public participation in service delivery planning in South Africa | Kgobe | Journal of Local Government Research and Innovation and Public support for participation in local development - ScienceDirect
5. On using information flow to aid in accountability and combating corruption, see eg Decentralization and Corruption in Public Service Delivery: Local Institutional Arrangements That Can Help Reduce Governance Risks | Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory | Oxford Academic
6. Relevant articles for our conflict work, can be found at www.conflict-conversations.co.za
(Andre Vlok can be contacted at andre@conflict1.co.za for any further information.)
(c) Andre Vlok
February 2026