Edwin Matlapeng

“Our people” just filed for divorce. Every election season, a familiar chorus starts up. Parties on every side of the spectrum step to the mic and declare, with impressive confidence, that their people will deliver the victory. Black people. White people. Coloured people. Indian people. Religious People. Rural people. Kasi people. The list is long, the ownership claimed is absolute, and the maths is always assumed to be settled. Then the results come in. This week’s local government elections delivered the clearest reminder yet that voters are not a fixed asset on anyone’s balance sheet. Long standing majorities cracked. Dozens of councils are hung. “Our people” looked at the sewage in the streets, the lights that never stay on, the water that sometimes arrives, the clinics that run out of basics, and decided the loyalty programme had expired. The reaction from some quarters has been a mix of surprise and mild betrayal. As if the electorate had somehow breached the terms of an unwritten contract. As if identity was a binding agreement and service delivery was merely a nice to have. Here’s the less poetic truth: people do not belong to political parties. They belong to their own lives. They want water that comes out of the tap, electricity that stays on, roads that do not eat their tyres, and refuse that is actually collected. Race, history and rhetoric may open the door. They do not keep the lights on. When the basics fail consistently, the label “our people” becomes a historical footnote rather than a political fact. Some of us have spent enough time turning around organisations to know that ownership without delivery is just a story you tell yourself. Customers, employees, citizens - none of them stay because you claimed them. They stay because the system works better with you than without you. The moment it stops working, they exercise the only real power they have: they leave. South Africans just did exactly that, in large numbers, across the country. The parties that still want to talk about “our people” might want to spend less time counting them and more time serving them.