“In God we trust; all others must bring data,” said American statistician and management theorist W. Edwards Deming – a reminder that accountability begins with evidence.
Every month, my colleagues and I try to answer simple questions that matter to people living in African cities: how much are councils actually spending on repairing broken water pipes, improving sanitation, and providing services? How much revenue do cities generate, and from which sources? And what services are citizens receiving for the taxes and tariffs they pay?
The answers almost always exist somewhere inside government servers or filing cabinets. Too often, though, they live behind locked doors, and those that are public are rarely up to date. You can’t repair a city or hold governments accountable in the dark.
Public sector information is a cornerstone of democratic governance. It enables governments to respond more effectively to citizens’ needs, strengthens key democratic values like transparency and accountability, and opens pathways for innovation, investment, and broader economic growth. But this information fulfils its democratic purpose only when it is open, accessible, and usable.
At Good Governance Africa (GGA), we commenced a continent-wide effort to make local data available, accessible, and actionable. Our African Cities Profiling project is a first step towards establishing an African cities development databank that brings together municipal finance, service delivery, environmental and other vital urban information that residents, journalists, planners, the private sector, and others can use. The goal is to provide a comparable record of how cities are governed, how services perform, and the overall development of cities.
In our first ten Southern African Development Community (SADC) cities, we have found that in most cases, the data we need already exists, but is not publicly or easily available. Budgets, procurement registers, debt obligations, and service-delivery indicators are often treated like internal memos. To obtain them, citizens and other stakeholders need to send an email, phone a switchboard, or submit a formal letter and then wait, and wait some more. In some municipalities, nobody replies. In others, the most recent data posted publicly stopped years ago, even though the data may be available internally.
Budgets are the most obvious example. A budget is a promise about the future; execution reports tell you whether that promise was kept. Without timely, comparable, and accessible budgets and in-year performance reports, the public has no way to judge whether money for water pumps was reallocated to vehicle purchases, whether contractor invoices were paid on time, or whether arrears are spiralling.
In some cities, we were unable to find a current city budget online, and requests for access were often ignored or bounced between departments. Citizens should not need insider emails to see how their money is managed. If residents can’t track what was planned, what was spent, and who was contracted, they can’t reliably distinguish mismanagement from bad luck – or hold anyone to account, which withers democracy. And officials, deprived of external scrutiny and constructive feedback, miss chances to improve. When important datasets are gated behind requests, their existence is meaningless to most citizens.
Commitment to transparency
Addressing this requires a strong commitment to transparency and a presumption of open access at the local level, rather than a request-only approach. That principle can be written into council standing orders and procurement rules. A growing number of South African cities are already taking steps toward this kind of openness, though there is still room for improvement. Cape Town, eThekwini, and most recently Tshwane have each launched open data portals (ODPs) that make municipal information more accessible to citizens, researchers, businesses, and other stakeholders.
These portals are online platforms with large repositories of publicly available data on everything from service delivery to the economy and the environment. ODPs show what is possible when governments commit to sharing data consistently.
Regular publication on official websites can also achieve a similar goal. What matters is adopting a simple, practical framework that makes public key information, like budgets and expenditure, procurement and contracts, debt and arrears, service delivery indicators, and audit outcomes, accessible. Cities can begin modestly by releasing just budget and procurement data, then expand as systems and capacity improve. If privacy or security issues arise, anonymise, but publish.
Openness also enables comparability. A resident in Bulawayo should be able to compare their city’s waste collection frequency to that of Harare, Lusaka, or Johannesburg. GGA’s cities work is deliberately moving in that direction, aiming to provide common indicators, common definitions, and common formats.
Implementation is key
Open government laws are only as useful as their implementation. If the practical route to government data is still a slow-motion email chain, the law has not solved the problem. Openness also helps in settings where capacity is weak. When data are public, civil society, the private sector and universities become unpaid allies – they spot errors, build tools, and translate numbers into insight.
Funders and national treasuries can help by insisting that any funded city project includes an “open by default” clause for the underlying data. Support should be conditioned on simple quarterly releases, not one-off end-of-project PDFs that vanish into archives.
Importantly, good governance is the foundation on which open data systems must stand. Without sound institutional structures, accountability frameworks, and clear data management practices, even the most advanced open data systems struggle to deliver impact.
Overall, open data matters so much because cities are where governance touches daily life. Local government is the front door of the state and closest to the people. If the numbers behind that door are hidden, trust weakens. If they are open, residents and citizens become partners and participants, not supplicants. Open data makes failures visible and successes replicable, among other benefits.
Our aim with the African Cities project is to make openness routine, comparable, and useful through a reliable databank at the sub-national level that drives better decisions. We will continue to profile, build, and publish. But the fastest progress occurs when local councils adopt a presumption of disclosure and publish the basics, on schedule, by default.
Read our intelligence report on how the private sector can support building stronger data capacity in SA’s municipalities.
This article first appeared in Business Day.
Nnaemeka is a Senior Data Analyst at Good Governance Africa. He is also completing a PhD in Applied Data Science at the University of Johannesburg, funded by South Africa’s Department of Science, Technology and Innovation. Much of his research explores socio-political issues like human development, governance, bias, and disinformation, using data science. He has published research in scholarly journals like EPJ Data Science, Journal of Computational Social Science, Politeia, and The Africa Governance Papers. He has experience working as a Data Consultant at DataEQ Consulting and has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand both in South Africa.
