Seven mayors in five years: Johannesburg voters head to the polls as the ANC's grip on the cities slips

South Africans vote in local elections on November 4 with the country’s dominant party facing its weakest municipal showing, and with the mayors who follow likely to be decided in coalition talks rather than at the ballot box.

As Sunday World reported on 2 November, drawing on Reuters reporting, polling suggests support for the African National Congress could fall to as low as 31% to 34%, against the more than 60% it took in the 2011 local elections. The ANC is still expected to remain the biggest single party, but the party is losing ground across the metros.

Louw Nel, senior political analyst at Oxford Economics Africa, told Reuters that the Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party, was not collecting all of the ANC’s deserters. Voters, he said, were dispersing among several parties, including the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe, the party led by former president Jacob Zuma. Hundreds of parties are contesting.

What that means for a voter in Soweto or Cape Town is not an abstract question of party arithmetic. It decides who runs the water account, the refuse truck, the electricity substation and the clinic’s maintenance budget.

Mpho Moroka, 38 and unemployed, voted ANC in 2008. She told Reuters at a DA campaign rally that she had switched. “I’m from the township,” she said. “I saw the poverty, I saw the struggles and I saw that there is no change.” In Cape Town, 28-year-old first-time voter Abdul Tonta said he wanted change and jobs, and that he was voting to see people like himself and his brothers employed.

For Johannesburg, the coalition question is not hypothetical. The city has had seven mayors since 2021, and its previous two mayors came from a party holding three of the council’s 270 seats. Yunus Chamda, coordinator of the civil society group Joburg Crisis Alliance, formed in 2023 to deal with what he called coalition chaos, said shifting alliances and the revolving door of mayors have contributed to worsening services and financial decline, by giving small parties outsized leverage and letting politicians evade accountability.

“It’s created this huge instability,” Chamda told Reuters. “And when you confront political parties, they are able to divert the attack to the fact that it’s a coalition.”

One route analysts point to is a local version of the arrangement that put the ANC and DA into a national government after the 2024 election. Nel said the most important question in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni is whether they will produce a stable government. Neither party is keen. The ANC’s Johannesburg regional chairperson, Loyiso Masuku, said at a campaign stop last month that coalitions make it difficult to fully implement the party’s programme. The DA’s candidate for mayor of Johannesburg, Helen Zille, said partners often do not respect the agreements that were signed. “By definition, coalitions hold you back,” she said.

Chamda’s concern is the process itself. Under current legislation, he said, coalitions are left to parties to negotiate among themselves, with the terms settled behind closed doors rather than in front of the voters who have to live with them.