For the residents of Parys, Heilbron, Koppies, Vredefort, Edenville and Tumahole, the  judgment of the Free State High Court in Afriforum NPC v Ngwathe Local Municipality ([2025] ZAFSHC 184) was meant to be the turning point.

After years of service delivery  issues, the court finally said enough. It declared Ngwathe in breach of its constitutional  obligations. It directed the Free State Provincial Executive Council to intervene, impose  a recovery plan, and dissolve the council and appoint an administrator, simultaneously.  

That was on 20 June 2025. More than a year later, with every appeal exhausted and  the Constitutional Court having dismissed leave to appeal on 5 June 2026, the order  is now final. The PEC must comply. 

But here is the problem no one seems to have fully reckoned with: complying with  that order now, in the way some appear to intend, may plunge Ngwathe into a  governance vacuum so severe that it leaves the community worse off than before the  litigation began. 

The electoral timetable trap: The nine-month bar and the constitutional  deadlock 

South African local government law has always proceeded on the assumption that if  a municipal council is dissolved, democratic restoration follows swiftly.

Section  139(1)(c) and section 139(5)(b) of the Constitution both permit dissolution only on  the condition that an administrator is appointed to hold office “until a newly elected  Municipal Council has been declared elected.” That phrase is not decorative.

It is  constitutive. The constitutional power to dissolve is inseparable from the constitutional  obligation to restore elected governance. 

Now the question becomes, does the MEC intend to call a by-election within the 90- day period contemplated by section 159(2) of the Constitution and section 25 of the  Local Government: Municipal Structures Act 117 of 1998? This is not a technicality. 

Section 159(2) of the Constitution imposes an absolute constitutional obligation that  a municipal council must be elected within 90 days after its dissolution. Section 25(3)  of the Structures Act reinforces this by requiring a by-election within 90 days.

But here  is where the PEC’s proposed course of action collides with an immovable statutory  wall. 

Section 25(6) of the Structures Act provides that the municipal manager may not call  a by-election if the next election of all municipal councils must be held within nine  calendar months of the dissolution.

The next general local government elections are  scheduled for 4 November 2026. Calculating backwards, the nine-month bar has  already commenced. Any dissolution effected now triggers a mandatory obligation to  hold a by-election within 90 days that is legally impossible to discharge. The Electoral  Commission cannot set a date.

The municipal manager cannot call the election. The  constitutional obligation under section 159(2) of the Constitution cannot be met. 

This is not a scheduling inconvenience. It is a direct, irreconcilable conflict between  the Constitution’s command that a council be elected within 90 days of dissolution,  and the Structures Act’s absolute prohibition on calling that very election within nine  months of a general poll.

The only legally coherent outcome is that dissolution cannot  lawfully proceed in this electoral window.

To dissolve the council regardless is to create  a constitutional impossibility through executive action, a result that no court could  sanction and no legal system can tolerate. 

The governance vacuum and service delivery paralysis 

The consequences for ordinary residents are not abstract. They are immediate,  practical, and devastating. Section 35 of the Structures Act makes plain that an  administrator appointed under section 139(5)(b) holds office only “until a newly  elected Municipal Council has been declared elected.”

But where no election can  lawfully be held, the administrator’s constitutional mandate has no discernible  endpoint.

The administrator becomes a caretaker without a constitutional clock,  presiding over a municipality for months, potentially stretching into 2027, with no  democratic mandate and no elected council to which the community can hold anyone  accountable.

More critically, an administrator cannot perform the legislative functions that keep a  municipality alive.

The adoption of by-laws, the approval of annual budgets under  section 17 of the Municipal Finance Management Act, and the formal review and  adoption of the Integrated Development Plan under section 34 of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act 32 of 2000 are all functions constitutionally and  statutorily vested in the municipal council.

They cannot be delegated to, or assumed  by, an administrator acting alone. 

Think about what that means on the ground. Without a council to approve a budget,  Ngwathe cannot lawfully allocate funds to fix the burst sewage pipes that have been  poisoning the Vaal.

It cannot authorise emergency procurement for water tankers  when the reticulation system fails. It cannot pass the revenue-raising measures  needed to begin paying down the billions owed to Eskom.

It cannot adopt the by-laws  necessary to regulate land use, public health, or traffic in its towns. It cannot approve  the IDP that determines which roads get rebuilt and which communities get priority  for infrastructure spending. The municipality enters a state of administrative paralysis,  unable to tax, unable to legislate, and unable to plan its own development. 

For a community already traumatised by years of service delivery collapse, this is not  recovery. It is a deeper collapse, dressed in the language of compliance.

The very residents who turned to the courts for help, the families in Tumahole who have  endured water outages, the small businesses in Parys whose rates payments have  funded dysfunction, the schools and clinics across the municipal area that depend on functioning local government, now face the prospect of months without any elected  representative to take a complaint to, without any councillor to demand accountability from, and without any lawful mechanism to get the municipality moving again. 

How this ends matters less than who it serves 

What happens next in Ngwathe is, in many respects, legally uncharted. We have a  final court order, a looming electoral timetable, and a provincial executive that appears  determined to press ahead with a dissolution that the statutes may not permit.

The courts may yet be called upon to untangle this knot, and when they do, they will have to reconcile provincial intervention powers with the hard realities of the electoral  calendar in a way South African jurisprudence has not yet had to do. 

But whatever path the PEC chooses, and whatever the courts eventually say, the  measure of every decision must be the same: does it leave the people of Ngwathe better off than they are today? A lawful, carefully sequenced intervention that  stabilises finances, restores services, and keeps democratic accountability intact will  serve them.

A rushed dissolution that plunges the municipality into months of  administrative paralysis, leaving 180 000 residents without a council, without a  budget, and without anyone to hold to account, will not. 

The law is clear on what is required. The Constitution demands a recovery plan before  dissolution.

The Electoral Act and the Structures Act forbid a by-election in this  window. And the residents of Parys, Heilbron, Koppies, Vredefort, Edenville and  Tumahole deserve a resolution that respects both the court order and their right to  elected local government. However, this matter is ultimately handled, the only  outcome that matters is one that benefits the people of Ngwathe. 

Nkosiyapha Trevor Tshabalala is a Director of Vana Tshabalala Attorneys and  commentator on constitutional and administrative law.