Unless the Electoral Court comes to its rescue, the ANC will simply disappear from the ballot in at least two municipalities.
ANC flag outside Luthuli House on 15 July 2022. Picture: Michel Bega
For decades, the ANC has approached elections as favourites to retain the silverware. With home ground advantage, they had a certain lazy swagger, confident that with a stadium of baying supporters at their backs, the 50-50 refereeing calls would always go their way.
No longer. Coach Vladimir Lenin’s once-treasured tactical maxims have lost their magic. Captain Ramaphosa is out of puff and out of luck. And in the run-up to the 4 November fixture, things are getting worse.
First, the own-goal of the candidate lists for councillors and metro mayors. When the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) closed nominations on 28 August, the ANC had, for the second election in a row, missed the deadline.
Unless the Electoral Court comes to its rescue, the ANC will simply disappear from the ballot in at least two municipalities that it dominates at present.
The “technical glitch” excuse – the IEC says there was no malfunction on its side – is of the variety favoured by schoolchildren. The real question is why the ANC was still trying to upload mission-critical information at 4.57pm on the day of a 5pm deadline.
The explanation lies partly in rampant ANC factionalism and the vicious, sometimes literally deadly, competition for councillor nominations, with the access to patronage and criminal opportunity that municipal office brings.
The ANC’s own electoral committee had warned as far back as May 2025 the selection process should be underway by February 2026.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his national executive committee rejected the timetable as they feared the consequences: months of internecine warfare.
“We were going to lose focus on our work when people start to fight about positions,” secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said
It is that fear of its own members that also turned the selection of metro mayors into a farce. After more than 5 000 applications and a short-list of about 150 aspirants, Mbalula postponed the end-of-June announcement of the mayoral candidates for a month.
July came and went. Eventually, the ANC summoned the media on 22 August. Then, at the eleventh hour, it changed its mind again. Instead of eight mayoral candidates, the press was given 42 possibilities.
The definitive announcement was kicked down the road into September. The reason, the Sunday Times reported, was that the ANC’s leadership had settled on preferred candidates. Ramaphosa had intervened because he feared that disappointed contenders would make trouble. Then there is the Rev Frank Chikane.
The ANC had been talking up Chikane as its heavyweight answer to Helen Zille. Yet when Luthuli House finally submitted its council lists, Chikane’s name was not on the Johannesburg PR list. A clerical error, said Mbalula.
At the centre of almost all of this is Mbalula. But his response to the criticism has been short on contrition. He announced he was “the boss of the ANC”, described some critics as “rubbish” and boasted he was “unbendable steel”.
Finally, there is Ramaphosa himself. He has a different, long-running administrative problem: keeping the six-year-old political corpse of Phala Phala buried.
Last week, the substantive review was argued before a full bench and judgment was reserved. All this is an awful advertisement for the ANC.
This is a party in organisational and factional chaos. This is a president elected on promises of transparency and accountability, arguing against the disinterment of the Phala Phala coffin because he cannot afford the political consequences of what ghastly apparitions will emerge from it.
