South Africa: #LGE2026 – Seven Claims From the DA’s Election Manifesto Fact-Checked
South Africans will vote in local government elections on 4 November 2026. Survey data from Afrobarometer suggests that unemployment, crime, water and electricity are among voters’ main concerns.
These are also among the main issues the Democratic Alliance (DA) is campaigning on. The party’s election manifesto sets out how it plans to improve water supply, keep the lights on and make communities safer, among other priorities.
But how well do the manifesto’s claims reflect the situation today?
In this report, we check seven claims about service delivery against the best publicly available evidence.
For a broader comparison: See what the major parties are promising voters in the 2026 local elections.
Electricity tariffs are approved by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa. They include the cost of electricity used as well as fixed service and administration charges.
In 2007/08, electricity tariffs increased by an average of 5.9%. In the years that followed, tariffs rose sharply as state-owned power utility Eskom struggled to meet electricity demand. Rolling blackouts were introduced in 2007 to prevent the national grid from collapsing.
Tariff data from Eskom shows that between 2007/08 and 2025/26, electricity tariffs increased by a cumulative 1,077%.
How does this compare to the increase in inflation?
Inflation is commonly measured using a basket of goods and services typically bought by households. Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), the country’s national data agency, has 391 goods and services in its current basket, including food, clothing, housing and transport.
The consumer price index (CPI) measures changes in the cost of this basket.
The DA told Africa Check that it calculated the increase using CPI figures from Stats SA. It compared the CPI for January 2007 with February 2026, the latest figure available when the party made the calculation.
Over this period, CPI increased by a cumulative 173.5%. Put another way, something that cost R100 in 2007 would have cost about R273 by February 2026, on average.
The DA’s claim is correct.
‘Important to lower the cost of electricity’
“Electricity costs have increased way faster than inflation,” Jugal Mahabir, programme lead for local government at the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) in Johannesburg, told Africa Check.
He added that South Africa has a free basic electricity policy to help poor households, but the amount provided may not be enough. Households that are struggling but do not qualify may have to cut spending on other essentials or use electricity without paying for it, adding to municipal debt.
But the increase in electricity tariffs was beyond the control of municipalities because bulk electricity costs are an external factor.
“The price of bulk electricity increased and continues to increase substantially due to the issues we had in generation (lack of generation capacity etc),” Mahabir said in an e-mail.
“Methods of decreasing the cost of electricity, particularly bulk electricity generated, are an important aspect of the electricity reform agenda.”
The DA said that the claim referred to household refuse collection. Stats SA tracks this in its General Household Survey (GHS).
The 2025 GHS, the latest available, shows that 65.4% of households had their refuse collected at least once a week in 2016 – the highest share recorded over the period shown. By 2022, this had fallen to 59.9%.
The figure rose to 61.3% in 2024, before falling again to 59.7% in 2025.
Stats SA says the national figures show large disparities between rural and urban areas.
In the Western Cape, 92% of urban households had their refuse collected at least once a week in 2025, compared with 77.4% of rural households. The gap was much wider elsewhere. In the Eastern Cape, for example, 73% of urban households had their refuse collected, compared with just 1.9% of rural households.
The DA directed Africa Check to Safety First: The Economic Cost of Crime in South Africa, a World Bank report published in 2023. Using a widely used method, researchers estimated the measurable cost of crime at about R700 billion a year.
This was about 10% (9.6%) of South Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of goods and services produced in the country in a year. The researchers cautioned that the 10% figure should not be read as money wiped off the economy, because some of the spending still circulates through it.
They grouped the costs into three broad categories: transfer costs, protection costs and opportunity costs.
Protection costs were the largest share, at about 4.2%. These include spending by households and businesses on security and insurance. But this spending also supports industries that create jobs and contribute to GDP.
Transfer costs from stolen property were estimated at around 2.6% of GDP. These include theft from households and business, as well as extortion. The report notes that these are not always “absolute” losses, because stolen goods still exist and continue to be used, just by someone else.
The final category was opportunity costs, estimated at 2.8% of GDP. These include lost business opportunities and public money spent on policing and safety instead of other services.
The authors called the estimate “conservative” because it only includes costs that can be directly measured. Other costs were excluded because of limited data, including medical expenses, lost income and harder-to-measure effects such as trauma and distrust in the police. The report says these are “likely to be significant” in South Africa.
The report explains that the true cost could also be much higher because many crimes are never reported. The DA’s claim that crime costs the economy “up to 10%” of GDP understates the World Bank’s finding that the cost is at least 10%.
The ratio of police officers to private security officers can help show how much a country relies on paid protection rather than public policing.
In a written response to a parliamentary question in February 2026, acting police minister Firoz Cachalia said South Africa had 641,875 employed private security officers. By comparison, there were 151,492 sworn police officials in the South African Police Service (SAPS). This includes SAPS members employed under the Police Act, and excludes civilian staff.
These numbers are broadly in line with the latest official figures from SAPS and the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (Psira), which oversees private security providers in South Africa.
Annual reports show that in March 2025, South Africa had 155,231 police officers and 637,675 private security officers.
This gives a ratio of 4.24 private security officers for every police officer in 2026 and 4.11 to 1 in 2025. Both are close to the DA’s claim of 4:1.
However, Psira’s total covers more than just those working directly in guarding roles. Spokesperson Bonang Kleinbooi told Africa Check that it includes “individuals employed across the various roles regulated by Psira”, including technical and other roles in the industry such as alarm installers, locksmiths and consultants.
Psira did not provide a breakdown, but said “the guarding sector continues to account for the majority of actively employed security officers.”
If administrative or technical roles are included in Psira counts, this may be more equivalent to SAPS’ total workforce, including civilian and administrative staff, which in March 2025 was 187,681. If this number is used, the ratio is lower, at 3.4:1.
Either way, private security significantly outnumbers the police. Commenting on the private security sector in 2019, Gareth Newham from the Institute for Security Studies explained that “the growth of the industry has been as a result of the crime situation, but also people not believing that they can rely on police”.
The World Bank report notes that “all households and firms are vulnerable to crime, but their capacity to protect themselves… depends primarily on their income. Thus, most South Africans and micro and small enterprises are largely unprotected”.
Municipalities are responsible for deciding which households are indigent.
The DA is not alone in criticising the gap between National Treasury estimates and municipal figures. In September 2025, finance minister Enoch Godongwana and cooperative governance minister Velinkosini Hlabisa urged municipalities to “urgently prioritise the development of credible indigent registers to facilitate the delivery of free basic services”.
The ministers noted that, as of March 2025, municipalities had identified just 2.8 million indigent households, while the national budget provided subsidies for 11.2 million. They said this left 8.4 million households without free basic services, despite municipalities receiving funding intended for them.
2019 data still holds
The DA told Africa Check that it took its figures from a 2021 report by PARI. The report used data from sources including the National Treasury’s annual national budget and Stats SA’s Non-financial Census of Municipalities (NFCM).
The 2019 budget set aside funding to provide free basic water, electricity, refuse removal and sanitation for 10.1 million households. This estimate was based on the 2011 census and an “affordability threshold” linked to the state old-age pension.
However, the budget review notes that this threshold is not an official poverty line and municipalities do not have to use it when deciding who qualifies for free basic services. It adds:
[I]f municipalities choose to provide fewer households with free basic services than they are funded for through the local government equitable share, then their budget documentation should clearly set out why they have made this choice and how they have consulted with their community during the budget process.
According to the NFCM, municipalities identified 2.9 million indigent households in 2019. Even fewer actually received free basic services. In 2019, 2.2 million households received free basic water and 1.8 million received free electricity.
‘Municipal mismanagement’
The DA’s manifesto attributes this gap to “municipal mismanagement”. The party told Africa Check that it considered this a reasonable conclusion based on the PARI report.
PARI identified several possible reasons for the gap. These include households without formal electricity connections, which cannot receive electricity services, and households that get water from communal standpipes. PARI said the exact reasons could not be determined because municipalities do not officially report why fewer households receive services than are funded.
In March 2026, public accountability organisation People’s Assembly pointed to other possible reasons, including poor public awareness of free basic services and difficulties identifying qualifying households in informal settlements and backyard dwellings.
Stats SA’s quarterly labour force survey (QLFS) is the standard source of employment data, but the agency told Africa Check that employment figures for metropolitan municipalities only became available from 2015, not 2014.
Cape Town had 19.75% more employed people in the first quarter of 2023 than in the first quarter of 2015. By the first quarter of 2024, it was 22.35% higher. Both figures are close to the DA’s claim, and were higher than those recorded in other metros over the same periods. eThekwini was second, with increases of 10.51% and 13.41%.
The DA told Africa Check that its claim was based on a 2025 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Development Southern Africa. The study, by South African economists Ivan Turok and Justin Visagie, used historical tax data from the Spatial Economic Activity Data project. This used income tax certificates to estimate the number of full-time jobs in an area. The method differs from Stats SA’s surveys, but the data does go back to 2014.
According to this data, the number of jobs in Cape Town increased from 1,059,897 in 2014 to 1,272,829 in 2023, a 20.1% increase.
The QLFS is not limited to full-time employment, and includes any person who “did any work for at least one hour, or had a job or business but were not at work” during the survey period. However, the increases recorded by both sources are consistent with one another.
In follow-up research, published as a chapter in the report Cities Economic Outlook 2026, Turok and Visagie noted that in the decade 2014-2024: “Cape Town, in particular, has performed somewhat better than the other cities.”
The most recent data
The latest QLFS at the time of writing covers the second quarter of 2026 and showed eThekwini overtaking Cape Town as the metro with the lowest unemployment rate. But Stats SA told Africa Check that labour markets are better compared using several measures as this gives a fuller picture of the economy.
Although eThekwini now has the lowest unemployment rate among metros, Cape Town still performed better on several other measures. Its “absorption rate” – the share of working-age people that are employed – is 55.7%, the highest of any metro. eThekwini is next at 46.9%.
Over a longer period, Cape Town continued to show the strongest employment growth among metros. It had 1.843 million employed people in the second quarter of 2026 – 26.93% more than in the same quarter of 2021, just before the previous local government election, and 25.54% more than in 2016.
The DA told Africa Check that it calculated this figure by comparing the number of employed people in Cape Town in the first quarter of 2022, shortly after Hill-Lewis became mayor (in November 2021), with the second quarter of 2026. The difference in the QLFS was 418,000 people.
This is below the DA’s claim of “around half a million jobs”.
Stats SA has previously explained that seasonal changes in employment can affect some provinces more than others. For this reason, statisticians usually compare the same quarter from one year to the next.
Four years after Hill-Lewis took office, Cape Town had 438,000 more employed people in the first quarter of 2026 than in the first quarter of 2022.
Using the second quarter of each year, the increase was 345,000.
By Africa Check
