The ANC’s 8% Municipal Maintenance Promise: What It Means

The number that changes the pipes

One number in the ANC’s 2026 manifesto will decide whether most of the others hold: 8%.

The manifesto’s first action area commits every ANC-led municipality to invest at least 8% of the value of its assets, every year, in the maintenance and renewal of water, sanitation, electricity, roads and stormwater systems. It is a single rule with a single purpose: to stop the infrastructure the country built over three decades of democratic government from decaying while budgets chase new projects.

This is the third piece in The People’s Register’s Masakhe series and the first of six explainers, one for each action area. The second piece tracked the manifesto’s first 100 days. Action One comes first for a reason: every other promise in the document, from jobs to safety, rests on services that actually run.

What Action One promises

The action area’s measurable targets, in the manifesto’s own terms:

Alongside the targets, the action area commits the movement to rebuild engineering, technical and yellow-fleet capacity in municipalities, with support from national institutions including the Municipal Infrastructure Support Agency. The capacity commitments matter because the 8% rule is only as good as the teams able to spend it.

Why a percentage, not a rand

The manifesto’s choice of a percentage rather than a rand amount is the quiet discipline in the rule. A rand figure erodes with inflation and is the first line raided in a tight budget year. A percentage of assets scales with the size of what a municipality owns and survives every budget cycle.

It is also checkable in a way few promises are. Every municipality’s annual report discloses the value of its assets and what it spent on maintenance. Dividing one by the other takes a resident, a journalist or an auditor no special powers. The 8% rule turns the most neglected line in municipal budgets into a public ratio.

At the launch, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa described the parallel discipline for electricity: municipal revenue ringfenced for network maintenance, at an expected 8% of budget, so that money collected for power cannot disappear into general spending. The same principle runs through the action area: money meant for infrastructure must reach infrastructure.

Water: the below-30% target

The second number in Action One targets the country’s most visible service failure. Non-revenue water is water a municipality treats and pumps but never bills for: water lost to leaking pipes, burst mains and failing meters, and water taken without payment.

The manifesto’s target is non-revenue water below 30% in every metropolitan municipality. Nelson Mandela Bay’s most recently reported figure, as this publication’s research desk has documented, is 52.74%. More than half the water the metro treats never reaches a paying household or business.

What separates the target from the delivery is a plan, and the shape of a credible one is knowable in advance. It would publish, at minimum: the loss baseline by supply zone; the split between physical leaks and commercial losses; repair and replacement priorities; metering coverage; monthly loss reductions; and spending against the 8% rule. Each is a document a resident can ask for, and this publication will.

The repair clock

Action One’s most immediate instrument runs monthly. The repair clock, published by ward, must show water, sewerage, electricity, streetlight, pothole and refuse cases, with at least 85% of reported cases met.

The clock matters because it is the one commitment in the action area a resident can check every month, without waiting for an annual report or an election. It converts service delivery from a press statement into a recurring number, and recurring numbers are what the rest of this series will follow.

The Bay’s test

For Nelson Mandela Bay, Action One is the manifesto’s centre of gravity. The metro’s reported water losses sit at 52.74% against a below-30% target. Its infrastructure department has filled three of 73 advertised critical-maintenance posts, as this publication has reported. Its budget carries National Treasury’s unfunded assessment.

The 8% rule reaches all of it: the pipes, the pump stations, the fleet and the posts that maintain them. Applied to the metro’s asset base and published in its budget, it becomes the single number against which the whole action area can be measured, term after term.

The first test arrives with the first budget a new council passes. Does maintenance reach 8% of asset value? This publication will report the answer, and the water figure that follows it.

Sources and further reading

This explainer is based on the ANC’s 2026 Local Government Elections Manifesto, Masakhe: Let Us Build, Action One (pages 19 to 24), on this desk’s commitment-by-commitment review of the document, and on official records previously reported for Nelson Mandela Bay.

• Download the manifesto: Masakhe, Let Us Build (PDF, 65 pages)
• The People’s Register: Ramaphosa Launches ANC’s 2026 Local Government Manifesto in Diepsloot
• The People’s Register: What Masakhe’s First 100 Days Will Look Like in Your Ward