Ramaphosa tells South Africans to vote, and says he will not tell them who for

President Cyril Ramaphosa has called on every eligible South African to vote in the local government elections, and said plainly that he will not tell them who to vote for.

As eNCA reported on 29 October 2026, Ramaphosa framed the elections around what councils actually do. Local government, he said, is where the aspirations of the democracy have to find practical expression, where people experience public services, where the conditions for economic development are set, and where the relationship between citizens and government is most immediate.

His ask was simple. “I therefore encourage every eligible voter to participate in these elections. And it is not for me to say who you should vote for.”

That last line is the one worth pausing on. A president urging turnout while explicitly declining to direct the vote is a small but deliberate distinction, and it lands in an election where the stakes are unusually local.

What South Africans are being asked to decide is not a national government but the councils that run water, electricity, refuse collection, roads, clinics and the licensing offices people queue at. When a tap runs dry or a substation fails, the answer usually sits in a municipal office, not in Pretoria. That is the practical weight the president attached to the poll.

The contest itself is unsettled. Major parties are fighting for the country’s biggest metros, and the reporting points to no clear indication of an outright winner. Where no party takes a council outright, coalitions decide who governs, and every seat and every vote counts towards who sits in the mayoral chain and who controls the budget.

For voters, the choice is about which of those parties they trust with the services in their own street. Ramaphosa’s message was that the decision belongs to them, and that turning out is the point.

The Independent Electoral Commission runs the election and its Results Operations Centre is the hub where the count is collated and published once voting closes. The Enquirer has no further detail on dates or logistics beyond what has been published.