Shivambu calls Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma on election eve and thanks her for the support
The Afrika Mayibuye Movement leader used the video call to put jobs, water, land and undocumented foreign nationals at the centre of his election message, and social media users asked when his position changed.
Floyd Shivambu, president of the Afrika Mayibuye Movement, held a video call with March & March leader Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma on the eve of the 2026 local government elections and afterwards thanked her publicly for the support.
Briefly News reported on 4 November that Shivambu shared the call on X, where Ngobese-Zuma described election day as “a big day for the country”. In the conversation Shivambu said he was checking in on people who had been backing the movement, and expressed the hope that voters who had been complaining on the ground would turn out in numbers.
He used the call to put his movement’s case to those voters: jobs, water, service delivery and land. He argued that up to two million jobs were held by undocumented foreign nationals who were, in his words, “not supposed to be here”.
On migration he was direct about what the party’s name does and does not mean. “There is no pan-Africanism that promotes illegal movements of people in South Africa or anywhere in the world,” he said, affirming the Afrika Mayibuye Movement’s position that its pan-African name is not an endorsement of what he called illegality.
The call is the second public contact between Ngobese-Zuma and a party leader in a short space of time. She earlier met Jacob Zuma, leader of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party. Both camps have publicly backed her campaign against illegal immigration.
That sequence, and its timing on the eve of the polls, is what South Africans on X picked up on. Some questioned why several parties were engaging Ngobese-Zuma so close to voting day. One user wrote that the parties were posting the contact as if it were a win. Another said everyone wanted a piece of her in the last push before the elections.
Others went at Shivambu’s record rather than the timing. One asked when he had changed his stance on migration, pointing to the EFF constitution and policy he had a hand in drafting before he left the party to lead Afrika Mayibuye. Another questioned a party named for Africa taking the positions it does, and one told him to drop the continental framing and be a hero to South Africans first.
For a reader following the migration argument, the exchange matters for what it shows about the state of the election contest. The load on jobs, water and services, and the question of who may remain in the country and on what terms, are being claimed by more than one party in the same week, and the public is testing each of them against what they said before.
Shivambu’s two million figure is his own claim, made in the call, and was not accompanied in the conversation by a source or a date for the estimate. It is the kind of number that lands hard in a country with unemployment at the levels South Africa carries, and it will be tested against official statistics by anyone who wants to argue with it.
The March & March Movement, meanwhile, has issued a public debate challenge to Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi after she said the government cannot allow anarchy in response to the movement’s protests. Many of those who responded to that challenge doubted she would accept it.
Voting in the local government elections is under way. The results will show whether the argument Shivambu and Ngobese-Zuma made on the eve of the poll moved the voters they were appealing to.
