Rifqah Tifloen
Sometimes I think the bar for celebrating democracy in South Africa has become embarrassingly low. The water came on today. The bins were collected. Someone finally fixed the pothole. Incredible scenes. But are we mistaking basic service delivery for meaningful political vision?
Democracy cannot just mean being pleasantly surprised when the basics work. It is a way of being, not a destination, and we feel it most clearly at the point of delivery: in who holds power, who gets heard, who is accountable, and whose needs are met. It is more than ticking a ballot box every four years and hoping the recipe will somehow fix itself. Democracy is lived in the long stretch between elections, in how communities organise, hold one another accountable, and find ways to meet collective needs when formal systems simply don’t.
If democracy is a way of being, then formal institutions cannot be the only places in which we look for it. Across Southern Africa, communities are developing forms of participation, accountability, governance and service delivery that exercise political agency. These practices are not intended to replace the state, but they do challenge the assumption that Western liberal democracy is the only legitimate model through which democratic life can be recognised.
In Bellville South, residents tired of being consulted only after decisions had already been made ran their own series of workshops mapping their neighbourhood, where the safety hazards were, which vacant parcels of land could become housing and what the community’s actual housing backlog looked like. When the city later moved to auction off a piece of that land, the community could point to its own plan and say no. In Witzenberg, a group of domestic workers refused to accept that fifty rand of electricity should buy only four units and kept asking their municipality’s chief financial officer to explain himself. In Wentworth and Austerville (eThekwini), Ward 92 in Cape Town, and a mix of communities in uMsunduzi Municipality, residents have begun drafting their own manifestos to hold their councillors to account. All of it is democracy being practiced.
These stories are not isolated exceptions. People aren’t waiting for permission to govern their own lives, they’re already doing it. They raise a larger question: what might become possible if practices like these were brought into conversation across communities, countries and regions?
It is in this spirit that ACT Ubumbano has joined a collective including the Nelson Mandela Foundation, SIVIO Institute, TrustAfrica, Action Aid, and My Vote Counts among them — in a new, multi-year initiative: (Re)Imagining Africa’s Democratic Futures.
It begins at home. The Southern Africa Imaginarium convenes from 19-21 October 2026, bringing together community organisers, grassroots leaders, emerging scholars, and practitioners already experimenting with accountability at the edges of what is formally recognised. It is deliberately making space for those who feel governance failure most acutely. The process will travel to East, West, and North/Central Africa, plus a diaspora process, each surfacing its own practice inventory and stories of accountability, feeding into a continental convening on what African-led, African-rooted democratic thought and practice could look like.
The coming together of these organisations has been its own experiential, emergent process, and is seen as part of the larger system of new practices we are trying to grow. Within that circle, ACT Ubumbano is carrying responsibility for the methodology that will shape the Imaginariums. The design itself is being worked out collectively, across long sessions with facilitators, historians, and partners each contributing different ingredients, histories and ways of knowing to the table.
We’re also alive to the fact that we are not doing this work in a vacuum, and we’re not pretending South Africa’s mood is separate from the continent’s. The graphic that opened this piece resonates with me because it reflects something many of us feel: a growing, cross-generational, cross-region impatience with politics-as-performance, and a hunger for politics that actually changes daily life.
We’ll be sharing more as the Southern Africa Imaginarium approaches. Watch this space for more in the series ‘Re-imagining Democracy Futures’.
