With elections just over a year away, African National Congress (ANC) president Cyril Ramaphosa is urging party members to ensure their selection process for councillors in the 2026 local elections produces impeccable and capable public representatives.
The ANC leader was speaking at the opening of their Special NEC underway in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, on Saturday. The two-day meeting was called to discuss the state of local government with a Roll Call meeting of the ANC’s over 6 000 councillors and mayors planned for Monday at the FNB Stadium.
This weekend’s discussions are centred around improving the local sphere of government and ensuring that it positively impacts the people it is meant to serve.
The effectiveness of a government is often judged by the services it provides to its people. As the frontline of service delivery, South Africa’s local government is no exception.
The Auditor General’s report has painted the country’s local government as an administration in a state of paralysis. It is rocked by poor audit outcomes, with only 41 municipalities or just 16% obtaining clean audits.
Corruption and mismanagement have become the characteristics of this tier of government, compounding the prevalence of poor service delivery. But ANC president says as the country heads to the polls, possibly next year, ANC members should select capable people who would serve the people with distinction.
”The ANC must ensure that our candidate selection methods for the forthcoming Local Government Elections produce capable, qualified candidates of impeccable moral standing. Much as we’re standing and talking as the ANC, I am calling on all political parties to deploy people who are skilled people and are knowledgeable about the local government.”
With the ANC having the highest number of councillors in this tier of government, Ramaphosa, who was visibly worried, says all the failures at the municipal level are blamed on the ANC, often feeding into the perception that the ANC is failing.
”All too regularly, corruption, mismanagement and outrageous lack of consequence management and accountability allow dysfunctionality to continue with impunity, thus prolonging the suffering of our people living in affected communities. Now this must end and this NEC must take bold decisions on how we are going to address this. This failure at the local government level feeds into a narrative about a failing and declining ANC and thus provides further ammunition for our detractors,” Ramaphosa adds.
The ANC president stresses that all party members deployed in government who fail to do their job and get involved in corruption must be removed without hesitation.
”We should be clear and firm on saying that if people who are deployed do not execute the tasks for which they are deployed for they must be removed without fail. If people who are deployed get involved in acts of malfeasance and stealing from the public purse, they must also be removed without any failure. This is the real heart of consequence management and accountability. We should know that the concept of consequence management and accountability now has big legs, and people should be held accountable.”
ANC – SACP
Although the meeting was initially touted as a gathering that would discuss the fallout between the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) following the Communist Party’s decision to contest elections independently, ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula says that the discussion has been deferred to their regular meeting planned for some time next month.
”We are not going to discuss that it is coming in the regular NEC meeting. It’s up for discussion and we have adopted a perspective on the party. So we will discuss that, but it will be preceded by a bilateral meeting with the communist party. So it is better before we pronounce on anything, we finalise our bilateral with the party, as you would know that we are opposed to the party standing on its own. But if it has to happen, we have got to process a strategic debate on if it happens, how it happens,” Mbalula explains.
The ANC Special NEC ends on Sunday and will culminate in a Roll Call meeting of its over 6 000 councillors and mayors planned for the FNB Stadium on Monday, where these public representatives will account for their work since assuming their office after the 2021 local polls.
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