Abstract
The local government in South Africa is plagued withmany problems, some of these
problems are attributable to incompetence of the employees and politicians. In the Freestate province,
most of the municipalities have been placed under administration due to unclean audits experiences
for some time. This paper investigates the drivers of failure and collapse of service delivery in
Matjhabeng local municipality. The study adopted a mixed method approach to review strategic
documents. The web of science was used to conduct a systematic search for literature based on cooccurrences
and key word analysis. It appears that based on the key themes including local government
and service delivery in South Africa only 7 articles were relevant. The results reveal that the local
government is faced with service delivery challenges. The paper provides an opportunity for further
research and improvements on policy analyses. The paper recommends that the municipalities should
implement performance management systems to improve service delivery.