If residents cannot trust the water coming out of their taps, they have every reason to question the promises coming out of their politicians’ mouths, writes Qaanitah Hunter.

While investors warm to South Africa’s potential, Gauteng’s dark streets expose a government that has stopped even pretending to deliver the basics, writes Qaanitah Hunter.

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has accumulated immense power but has yet to demonstrate the organisational discipline the party needs – and with an election looming, the cost of that gap is becoming impossible to ignore, writes Qaanitah Hunter.

Qaanitah Hunter argues that the MK Party’s likely sweep of KwaZulu-Natal on 4 November has less to do with its own competence than with the ANC’s patronage networks migrating to a new vehicle of power.

The unprecedented number of candidates and parties in this year’s local government elections points to deepening political fragmentation, writes Qaanitah Hunter. Smaller parties will gain outsized power as kingmakers, while the IEC faces its toughest administrative test yet.

The roads of northern KwaZulu-Natal tell a story of municipal failure that crosses party lines. The ANC’s inability to turn that failure into a comeback reveals the machinery that once made winning possible, writes Qaanitah Hunter.

Strip away the grand statements and political theatre, and what we have is, essentially, a bunch of bigots having tea, writes Qaanitah Hunter in her reflection on the March and March and AfriFourm meeting.

The ANC’s self-assessment of five years in local government celebrates administrative gains like clean audits and new oversight systems, but those reforms mean little to residents still waiting for water, electricity, and working sewers, writes Qaanitah Hunter.

If Ghana wants a continental family meeting, let us have one, writes Qaanitah Hunter. Family meetings require honesty, and South Africa has files of its own.

When an anti-corruption institution is accused of being drawn into the very factional battles it was established to rise above, its credibility inevitably suffers, writes Qaanitah Hunter.