ANC tells its new councillors: 30 days to find out what your ward needs, then 100 days to fix the plan

The ANC has told the councillors elected under its banner that they have 30 days from the constituting of a council to go back into their communities and identify local priorities, after which mayors and their teams get 100 days to review Integrated Development Plans against the money actually available.

Nomvula Mokonyane, the party’s First Deputy Secretary-General, set out the timetable as political parties monitored results at the IEC Results Operations Centre in Johannesburg. As eNCA reported on 6 November, Mokonyane said councillors elected under the ANC’s banner must prioritise service delivery and remain accountable to their communities.

She said more than 99% of the party’s ward councillor candidates emerged from community-led processes, and that the party had taken its candidates through political education and governance training.

The two deadlines are the part residents can hold to account, because both fall inside the term of the council being constituted now. The 30-day return to the ward is a listening exercise. The 100-day IDP review is the point at which a municipality’s spending plan, which sets out what gets built, maintained and staffed over the years ahead, is tested against the budget available, and where stakeholders are meant to be engaged on what comes first.

An IDP is the document that decides which ward gets the water reticulation, which clinic gets the upgrade, and which informal settlement gets electricity. It is drafted and reviewed on a five-year cycle, and the review that follows an election is the one where a new council’s promises meet a treasury that has already been allocated. That is why the 100-day window matters more than the speeches around it: it is the first hard test of whether a ward’s priorities survive contact with a budget.

For residents, the practical question is a simple one. A councillor who does return within 30 days, and a mayor who does open the IDP to stakeholders within 100, gives a community a written record of what was promised and when. A councillor who does not leaves the ward with nothing to measure the next five years against.

The ANC’s instruction to its own councillors is also an admission of the problem it is trying to answer. Accountability to communities and prioritising service delivery are named as obligations because they cannot be assumed. The party’s claim that its candidate selection was community-led, and that its candidates were trained in governance, is the party’s own account of how it prepared for these councils.

Counting was still under way at the Results Operations Centre when Mokonyane spoke, and the party balance in individual councils will determine how much of this timetable any mayor can actually deliver. Where no party holds a majority, the IDP review becomes a negotiation between coalition partners before it becomes a conversation with residents.

The deadlines, once councils are constituted, are the part that can be checked.