ANC has still not named its mayoral candidates weeks before local elections

The ANC has not announced its mayoral candidates for the country’s big metros and strategic secondary cities, with local government elections now weeks away and no indication of when the party plans to make the announcement.

That is the central finding of reporting by eNCA, which described the position as a promise not kept.

The party had said it would reveal its candidates during September, after completing interviews. It did not. Asked directly about the delay, a party representative said no determination had been made to make the announcement, that national officials remained seized with the matter, and that nothing else had changed. Pressed on the reasons, the same answer came back: there are no particular reasons.

The ANC’s own framing is that the campaign does not depend on its candidates. According to the party, the campaign is driven by the ANC itself and its face is the president, with mayors as an addition to that effort rather than its foundation.

Elections are decided by voters, but the choice of who governs a metro matters to residents in concrete ways. Mayors and mayoral committees sit at the head of municipal administrations that set budgets, award tenders, run services and carry the legal responsibility for water, electricity, refuse collection and billing. A party that has not named its candidate for a metro has not told voters who would carry that responsibility if it won.

The practical effect was visible during mayoral candidate debates held while the announcement remained outstanding. The ANC sent people who would not appear on the ballot for the party, while other parties deployed their actual candidates.

A leadership expert told eNCA that the failure to announce on time signals deeper division within the party and could carry a negative impact for it. The expert’s assessment was that a party cannot wait until the eleventh hour and then say it has problems, and that the delay points to disorganisation inside the organisation.

What the party has said, what it has not done, and the expert’s reading of it are three different things, and only the first two are settled. The transcript does not record an ANC explanation beyond the statement that there are no particular reasons, and it does not record a date by which the announcement will now be made.

South Africa’s local government elections turn substantially on municipal performance, and the metros are where the largest share of the country’s residents live and where service delivery failures are felt most directly. The question of who a party would put in charge of those administrations is therefore not a procedural detail.

Source: eNCA (YouTube), ANC yet to announce mayoral candidates