Tsantsabane voters wipe out ANC majority as nine-month-old community movement takes all seven wards

Residents of Tsantsabane in the Northern Cape have removed the ANC from control of their municipality, handing a nine-month-old community movement seven of the council’s 13 seats and an outright majority that needs no coalition partner.

The Electoral Commission of South Africa’s results dashboard showed Rise Tsantsabane Communities (RTC) in control of the council after 100% of votes were counted. As Sunday World reported on 5 November, RTC took seven seats, the ANC three, and the DA, EFF and Patriotic Alliance one each.

The scale of the ward result is the story. RTC won all seven ward seats, which shuts the ANC and every established opposition party out of direct ward representation. The ANC returns to the council only through its three proportional-representation seats, and the DA, EFF and PA likewise sit only on the PR benches.

That matters because a party can control a council without winning a majority of the party vote if it sweeps the wards, and RTC did. With 24 of the municipality’s 28 voting districts reported, RTC stood on 46.7% of the PR vote, with 4,644 votes against the ANC’s 2,765, the DA’s 942, the PA’s 608 and the EFF’s 586. The outstanding districts did not overturn that position.

The IEC’s national party table records RTC controlling one municipality, and records the party with nine seats across the councils where its representation was counted.

The result reverses 2021, when the ANC took seven of the 13 seats and governed Tsantsabane outright. Save Tsantsabane Coalition and the DA held two seats each after that election, and the EFF two.

RTC was registered as a party on 18 February and fought the election as a local movement built around anger over poor municipal services, unemployment and the perceived failure of the mining operations around Postmasburg and the surrounding communities to improve residents’ lives. It promised permanent jobs, cleaner municipal government and better water, sanitation and roads.

At the manifesto launch in October, founder and mayoral candidate Michael “Gogo” Mabilo said the formation came out of residents’ frustration with deteriorating services. “The formation is about the suffering and poor service delivery,” he said, pointing to potholes and the area’s approximately 40 mines.

What happens now is that the protest message becomes a governing responsibility. RTC must elect a mayor, a speaker and other office bearers when the newly constituted council holds its first meeting, and its seven seats let it do that on its own provided all seven councillors vote together. The ANC, for its part, now sits in opposition in a municipality it previously ran outright.

For a reader outside the Northern Cape, the number to hold on to is nine months. A movement that did not exist as a registered party at the start of the year now runs a mining municipality, and it did so by winning every ward on the ground rather than by splitting a proportional vote.