ANC scraps mayoral candidate list two weeks before voting day
Mdumiseni Ntuli says the party will not name a single mayoral candidate anywhere in the country, after August and September deadlines passed with no names.
The ANC will not name a single mayoral candidate anywhere in the country before the 4 November local government elections, abandoning a commitment it had already pushed back twice.
ANC chief whip and head of elections Mdumiseni Ntuli confirmed the decision, as IOL reported on 18 October. The party had said it would announce its mayoral picks in August, then moved that to September. Both deadlines passed. Voting takes place on 4 November, leaving just over two weeks.
Ntuli said candidates had been interviewed and assessed by national officials, and that some were called to Johannesburg for a meeting of candidates before the leadership decided against naming them.
He said the party weighed the time remaining against the effect on the people who had put themselves forward. “You might not have a fallout but a disappointment, which might impact the work of the movement on the ground,” he said. “One might respond well or badly when they are disappointed after not being elected. Leadership decided it is about the party and not individuals.”
For voters, the practical effect is that in municipalities across the country they will cast a ballot for a party without knowing who that party intends to put in the mayor’s chair. The mayor is chosen by the council after the vote, not directly by residents, but the name at the top of a local list is one of the few things that tells a voter what a party means to do with the ward’s budget, its staff and its services.
The decision lands in a week the party has already spent in court. On Thursday the Constitutional Court ruled that the Independent Electoral Commission must include 181 councillor candidates across six municipalities on the ballot, following an appeal by the ANC. The IEC said it had measures in place to comply.
On Friday the commission put a number on what that compliance costs. It said 33 million ballots will have to be produced to accommodate the extension of the judicial injunction. Of that new total, 27 million had already been printed and six million had not. The six million belong to the six municipalities whose ballots were affected by the ANC’s appeal.
The IEC said it would also provide relief to other parties similarly affected.
So the last fortnight of this campaign now carries two things at once: a ballot paper that is still being printed in six municipalities, and a governing party that has decided its own candidates for mayor are better left unnamed until after the count.
