30 million South Africans registered to vote across nine provinces

South Africans are heading to the ballot box on Wednesday. More than 600 political parties will contest in this year's local government election. And in some areas, for the first time ever, we will see 60 candidates competing for one seat. This extremely high contestant rate reflects a governance crisis. Corruption, poor service delivery on municipal level have led community leaders To say that we will establish our own political parties or stand as independent candidates, pledging that they would be different than the current ruling party. But this wide range of options could mean that there would be even a higher possibility of coalitions being formed on municipal level. And governing within a coalition is not easy and might not bring the change that many voters hope for. Specialist Dr Elijah Masubulele explains. Coalitions are problematic by nature. You know, because you've got people who are, you know, joining hands, and yet they've got different policies. And whether, you know, ANC is the major party within that particular municipality, if their coalition member does not support, or coalition partner does not support their certain policies, they will always be at loggerheads. And that is one of the reasons we were seeing that services are not necessarily delivered to the people, because... Budgets cannot be passed. People come for meetings or they don't pitch when important decisions have to be made regarding services. So that creates much more problems. Now, it becomes worse when you've got many other smaller parties going into a coalition as opposed to having maybe two major parties going into a coalition. Tomorrow's election could see the ruling ANC losing even more power to smaller political parties.