181 ANC candidates are back on the ballot, and the man who lost the deadline is in a hospital bed

The Constitutional Court ruled in the ANC’s favour on Thursday, reinstating 181 councillor candidates the party had lost when it failed to complete the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s online submission process before the deadline for the November 4 local government elections.

The judgment removes an immediate electoral threat. The ANC had been heading towards a poll in which it would have had no candidates standing in key affected areas, and the court has now put those names back on the ballot.

What the ruling does not do is answer how the deadline was missed, or who answers for it.

The party told the court that problems with the electronic process contributed to the failure. The commission maintained that the submissions had not been properly finalised. Both positions sit in the record. Neither has been resolved by the judgment, which gives the affected candidates a path back into the contest without settling the administrative failure behind the litigation.

Mbalula became visibly unwell while speaking to journalists after the ruling and was taken for medical attention, along with his personal assistant.

ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu said both had been attended to. “I can’t exactly indicate the place they are at, but they have been attended medically, and we are certain that the secretary-general is going to be okay, together with Comrade Zodwa, his PA,” she said.

Bhengu linked the episode to the intensity of the proceedings. “It is a function of how emotional this process has been. It’s a function of also inside there it was really heated,” she said.

The cause of Mbalula’s condition has not been independently established.

For a South African reader, the practical stakes are straightforward. The IEC’s candidate submission process is the gate every party must pass to contest a municipality, and the November 4 elections decide who runs councils, who sets rates and service charges, and who controls the local appointments that shape whether a street gets water, a refuse truck or a title deed. A party that misses the gate does not lose an argument. It loses the ward.

Mbalula oversees the party’s organisational administration, which puts the nomination process in his office. He has occupied that office assertively. In May he declared, according to reports, “I’m the secretary-general of the ANC, I’m the boss here.” The remark drew attention to his leadership style and to friction involving other senior figures, including ANC chief whip Mdumiseni Ntuli.

The candidate-list dispute has since turned questions about his authority into a test of the ANC’s organisational systems, and it has unfolded alongside visible resistance inside the party. In September, Sunday World reported that President Cyril Ramaphosa had cautioned ANC leaders against using the candidate-list crisis as an opportunity to seek Mbalula’s removal, amid growing opposition to him within the party’s national executive structures.

More recently, in New Brighton in the Eastern Cape, ANC members challenged national working committee leaders and demanded that Mbalula attend a meeting. According to Nelson Mandela Bay members, they had waited for hours, citing frustration over the delay and the secretary-general’s absence. An unnamed NWC member separately suggested the incident reflected a wider attempt to weaken Mbalula’s position.

There is a second legal front. The Johannesburg High Court last week ruled against the party’s decision to remove ANC national executive committee member Andile Lungisa from its Nelson Mandela Bay proportional representation candidate list, adding another complication to the selection process.

All of this runs into a 2027 national elective conference, at which the ANC will choose its next leadership team. Mbalula has, according to reports, been eyeing either the presidency or the deputy presidency. His handling of the current organisational challenges may form part of how party members assess him. It remains unclear how the candidate-list dispute will affect any future bid, and his intentions should not be treated as settled without a clear public confirmation.

After the ruling, Mbalula defended the case as a question of democratic rights rather than an administrative disagreement. “The right to vote is not a privilege handed down by an institution. It is not a setting in a computer program, and it is not a pattern on a screen. It is a fundamental right, and it belongs to the people,” he said.

He also used the moment to raise the ANC’s relationship with its Government of National Unity partner. “There are matters, comrades, that this movement will now have to sit down and discuss. And one of those matters is our partners in the Government of National Unity, and that is the DA. We must review the DA in the Government of National Unity,” he said.

That call moved some of the focus onto the coalition’s future, on a day when the party was otherwise celebrating a court win.

As Sunday World reported on 15 October, Mbalula’s week ran from a political firestorm to a hospital bed. The sequence of events in that report is accurate, and the outlet’s account of the ruling, the medical attention and the internal tensions matches the record.

What a South African reader needs alongside it is the part that sits underneath the personalities. The court has restored the candidates. The commission’s deadline, the electronic submission process that the party says failed, and the question of who inside Luthuli House was responsible for finalising it have not been tested in any forum yet. Until they are, every ANC member in the affected municipalities is campaigning on a nomination that was nearly lost, and every voter there is being asked to choose from a list that was, for a period, not going to exist.

The Enquirer has put the outstanding questions about the submission process to the ANC and the IEC and will publish their answers when they respond.