Mary Phadi votes in eMalahleni as ActionSA tests its first Mpumalanga campaign

Mary Phadi votes at Bankenveld Curro Private School in eMalahleni on Wednesday, where the former MK Party leader appears on the ballot under ActionSA’s banner as the party’s candidate for Nkangala district mayor.

She is scheduled to cast her ballot at 10am, in voting district 54650639, according to registration details she gave Sunday World. As that outlet reported on 30 October, the vote is the first test of whether her political influence survives her departure from the party she helped build in Mpumalanga.

Phadi was among the MK Party’s most prominent faces in the province two years ago. She helped establish its provincial structures and then led its caucus into the Mpumalanga legislature after the 2024 general elections, when the party took 193 995 votes and nine provincial legislature seats, overtaking both the DA and the EFF to become the official opposition.

The relationship did not hold. In October 2024 the MK Party expelled her amid allegations that she had defied party instructions. She went to court and won temporary relief before the dispute returned to the judiciary. In July 2025 the Mbombela High Court upheld the expulsion, ending her tenure as an MK Party representative and her seat in the provincial legislature.

Speaking to Sunday World after that ruling, she described the break in personal terms. “I have so much respect for Mr Zuma. That man broke my heart. I am human. In summary, I feel that I was betrayed by Mr Zuma,” she said.

In April, ActionSA president Herman Mashaba unveiled her as the party’s mayoral candidate for Nkangala District Municipality, placing her at the centre of its drive into Mpumalanga municipal politics. ActionSA presents itself as an alternative built on competent administration, accountability and municipal service delivery, a different proposition from the MK Party’s grounding in Zuma’s political legacy.

Phadi’s argument to voters is about the vote itself. “Not voting means giving up my voice because elections are decided by the people who go out and vote,” she told Sunday World. “If I don’t vote, someone else will make the decision for me. I will be stuck with other people’s choices, and I won’t even be able to complain because I allowed it to happen.”

She added: “By participating in the electoral process as a voter, I get a say in how things are done for the next five years. My power is in my vote.”

Nkangala is not a single town. The district takes in eMalahleni, Steve Tshwete, Emakhazeni, Victor Khanye, Dr JS Moroka and Thembisile Hani, a mix of coal-mining and industrial centres and rural communities. Its economic weight has not shielded its municipalities from complaints about water provision, roads, infrastructure and administration, and those are the issues on which local voters tend to judge parties.

Phadi brings a transport and logistics background to the contest. She is president of the Truckers Association of South Africa, which gives her familiarity with the link between infrastructure, industry and economic opportunity in a district built on both.

Her political task is different from 2024. Then she was helping establish a new party in a national election. Now she must build an ActionSA local base in Mpumalanga from a standing start, in a province where the party did not contest the 2021 municipal elections with the established presence the ANC, DA and EFF had.

“These elections are a historic moment for Mpumalanga, as the province will be participating in the local government elections under ActionSA for the first time,” she said. “ActionSA will mark 2026 as a breakthrough into municipal elections.”

One structural point matters for anyone reading her campaign as a direct contest for the mayoral chain. Residents do not elect district mayors. The position is decided by the district council, whose composition follows the local government electoral system. Phadi’s path to the post therefore depends on how ActionSA performs across the district and on the political balance that emerges once the votes are counted. If no party wins sufficient control, negotiations and alliances between parties will decide it.

Beyond the party arithmetic, the campaign puts a question to voters in the mining towns and rural wards of Nkangala that her own political history cannot answer for her: whether a business and transport record and a new party label add up to a credible alternative on water, roads, jobs and accountable local government.