Democracy and Service Delivery in the Post-Apartheid of South Africa: A Critical Review of Musina Local Municipality

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to evaluate the state of service delivery in the democratic South Africa. The beginning of democracy brought an anticipation of enhanced standards of living and service delivery for most South Africans who were longing for survival during the apartheid system. Twenty-eight years into democracy, the government appears to be still faced with difficulties in meeting the hopes of the citizens of the country. Policies, frameworks, and legislations such as the White Paper on Service Delivery and the Municipal Systems Act were promulgated to allow valuable service delivery to its people. The paper argues that this democracy did not transform into enhanced bread and butter issues as enthusiastically expected.This is a theoretical paper which relied on desktop study to acquire information. Government documents, Scholarly articles and newspapers were reviewed to analyse the democracy and development in the post-apartheid South Africa.Theoretically, In South Africa democratisation is taking place since pressures from subordinate classes have become strong enough to make demands for their inclusion credible. Even though there is democracy, there is still a huge backlog in the services delivery. The delivery process has the tendency of being biased to a certain group of people, particularly the people in rural areas. This paper concludes that, the apartheid regime left both of its footprints and legacy of disparities associated with service delivery that triumph up to date. However, looking at some positive progress that were noted, it is also evident that the government of the country South Africa has not taken a step back in terms of fighting against footprints and legacy of apartheid. Based on the conclusion, the paper recommends the need for government to ensure that policies about democracy and service delivery are continuously reviewed and updated until all the goals of development are achieved.