IFP launches 2026 local election manifesto in KwaMashu on Sunday

The Inkatha Freedom Party launches its 2026 local government election manifesto at Princess Magogo Stadium in KwaMashu on Sunday, with party president Velenkosini Hlabisa expected to set out what the IFP would do in the country’s municipalities and to name its mayoral candidates for the eight metros.

SABC News reported the launch on Saturday evening. The stadium sits in KwaMashu, north of Durban, and the party expects supporters to fill it.

Hlabisa has said the manifesto will centre on practical answers to three problems the IFP says run through municipal government: infrastructure that has collapsed, services that are not delivered, and money that is not accounted for.

That is the ground the party has chosen for the campaign. It is also the ground on which most South Africans meet local government directly, in the water that does or does not come out of the tap, the electricity that stays on or goes off, the refuse that is collected, and the rates bill that arrives whether or not any of it happened.

The numbers the party is working from

The IFP goes into these elections from a little over six percent of the national vote in 2021 and a little over 26 percent in KwaZulu-Natal, its stronghold. The party’s stated aim is to increase both.

KwaZulu-Natal is where that will be decided. The IFP faces the African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters, its traditional opponents in the province, and it now also faces the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, which SABC News describes as newly established and highly popular. That contest inside the province is the one to watch on Sunday, because a manifesto launch in KwaMashu is aimed at the same voters the MK Party has been drawing.

Naming mayoral candidates for all eight metros is the second half of the announcement and the more concrete one. A manifesto sets out what a party would do. A mayoral candidate tells voters who would be doing it, and in a metro that is governed through a coalition, the name on the ballot often matters more than the document behind it.

Why a local manifesto is a national story

Municipal elections are decided ward by ward, and the effect of a bad municipal government is not spread evenly. It lands on the household that queues for water, on the small business that cannot trade without power, and on the ratepayer who pays for a service that does not arrive. When a party campaigns on infrastructure, service delivery and financial management, it is campaigning on the three failures residents can see from their own street.

The IFP is not the only party that will make that argument before these elections. It is the party making it first, from a stadium in its home province, with its mayoral slate attached.

Sunday’s launch will show two things at once: whether the IFP can hold and grow the KwaZulu-Natal support it had in 2021, and how it intends to answer a rival that did not exist at the last local government elections.

Source: SABC News (website), Hlabisa to present IFP’s 2026 LGE manifesto in KwaMashu on Sunday