PUBLISHED BY:
WRITTEN BY:
Matshidiso Lencoasa
This week, the state of the nation address (SONA) once again takes centre stage, setting our government’s vision of the year ahead. For most South Africans, the state of our nation is experienced through public services.
Daily encounters with schools, clinics and frontline workers shape trust in government and a sense of whether the country is being built for its people.
Therefore, the SONA must be an opportunity to reckon with this reality by making an explicit commitment to rebuilding frontline public services in our communities. Its promises should clearly signal whether government intends to strengthen the schools and clinics on which our people rely.
In recent years, particularly in education and health, some commitments have been announced and then quietly scaled back when the national budget follows.
Building a country in which all can prosper requires the commitments made in the Sona to be backed by a budget that funds the rebuilding of frontline services.
The SONA and the crisis of reaching schools and care
Barely two months into the year, South Africa’s public services have already been tested in devastating ways. The tragic loss of pupils’ lives in a scholar transport crash near Vanderbijlpark has once again drawn attention to the risks many children face in accessing their constitutionally protected right to basic education.
These dangers are not new. The SA Human Rights Commission has called for scholar transport reform following its investigation in North West, where the provincial legislature conceded that the system was underfunded by R150 million.
Last year, in Mpumalanga, thousands of pupils were left stranded after service providers stopped operating due to nonpayment. In KwaZulu-Natal, pupils walk for hours just to reach the nearest school.
These experiences point to a system weakened by chronic underfunding, delayed payments and weak oversight.
It is clear that a 2026 Sona that puts South African pupils at its heart must commit explicitly to reforming and properly resourcing scholar transport.
The same systems that fail pupils on their way to school also fail patients on their way to care. SECTION27 has long raised concern about the deprioritisation of emergency medical services (EMS), including real-term budget cuts that have deepened pressure on the system.
This strain is particularly felt in rural provinces like the Eastern Cape, where poor roads, ageing fleets and long response times already place lives at risk.
As with scholar transport, the Sona must commit to rebuilding EMS and back this with targeted budget investments that strengthen frontline care.
This way, the Sona becomes more than a political speech, but actually reflects the states role in protecting lives and building the communities our people deserve to live in.
The SONA must commit to rebuilding the public workforce
Getting people to schools and clinics is only the beginning. Public services are made by real teachers, nurses, doctors and community health workers who give life to political promises. However, across the public sector, years of hiring freezes, unfunded posts and reports of ghost employees have hollowed out frontline capacity.
Schools operate with overcrowded classrooms and too few teachers, while clinics face long queues and overburdened staff.
Despite commitments to contain a ‘bloated’ public sector, walking into schools and clinics across the country reveals painful staff shortages that undermine the quality of public services.
The department of health has historically attributed its inability to absorb doctors, nurses and community health workers to a shrinking health budget. Thousands of teaching posts remain unfilled because of education budgets that fail to keep up with demand from our communities.
Social infrastructure is nation-building
In recent Sonas, President Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly emphasised infrastructure investment, even describing government’s ambition to turn South Africa into a “construction site”.
This focus is welcome because infrastructure investment can stimulate economic activity, create jobs, and address long-standing backlogs that constrain growth and service delivery.
The current state of infrastructure in our schools is appalling and unfair. Pupils in our communities truly deserve better.
At the end of last year, the Eastern Cape department of education lost R500 million from National Treasury owing to noncompliance with legal and procedural requirements.
We have an infrastructure crisis that is holding our country back from truly flourishing. If our state is serious about securing the futures of our people, we must treat social infrastructure as central to this and commit to both funding these projects and strengthening the state’s capacity to deliver them.
A Sona that takes this task seriously will commit to clear consequences for chronic underspending and targeted investment in skills and systems at provincial and local level including climate resilience.
Without this, infrastructure promises will continue to appear in speeches while schools and clinics fall apart.
Ultimately, the true test of this year’s Sona will not lie in the ambition of its promises, but in whether those commitments are carried through a budget that rebuilds the frontline services on which our communities depend.
If the state is serious about nation-building, it must begin where South Africans experience it most clearly: in the public systems that are holding our country together.
Lencoasa is a budget analyst at SECTION27 and a member of the Budget Justice Coalition.
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