That self-effacing “humble newspaperman”, Mondli Makhanya, has outdone himself by penning a couple of choice phrases in his predictions for the ANC’s fortunes in the upcoming municipal elections.
As the comments are tucked away at the end of a long Daily Maverick article, they bear repeating:
The ANC can forget about most of the metros and many of the secondary cities whose mayoral short lists were unveiled last weekend. The patronage pipeline to which ANC leaders and supporters have become addicted will vanish, leaving them shivering like drug addicts who have been forced to go cold turkey.
And:
The ANC manifesto – which is a mixed bag of over-promising, realism and common sense – is fanciful because the ANC seems not to have accepted that it has eaten itself and is on its last legs. The second-last nail will go into its political coffin on 4 November. In 2029 the last nail will go in and the procession to the cemetery will begin.
A very different perspective of what the nation can expect to emerge after the votes are counted on 4 November has emerged at much the same time from the pen of William Saunderson-Meyer in Politicsweb. He writes that:
The ANC enfeebled. The DA emboldened. The looming local government elections will deliver South Africa’s sternest test yet of its democracy.
At a national level, a worrying sign is the state’s intelligence apparatus increasingly insinuating itself into politics through the leaking to the media of dodgy ‘dossiers’ intended to smear opposition politicians and civic groups. At the local level, there is the furious response to the DA mayoral candidate Helen Zille’s recent unannounced visit to the Johannesburg Roads Agency’s asphalt plant, which has stood idle for a month after its gas-supply contract was allowed to expire. Workers hurled insults and formed a human chain to prevent the DA team from entering.
Saunderson-Meyer sums up his prognostications for the November elections thus:
The battle for the Gauteng metros is key to an ANC drubbing in the local elections. That, in turn, could fatally imperil its prospects in the 2029 general election. Arrayed against that outcome is an alliance of desperate interests: politicians, public-sector workers, securocrats, and criminal syndicates, who have everything to lose. They cannot be allowed to triumph.
The contrasting perspectives of the two senior scribes need to be measured against what the foundational values of the Constitution itself say about elections, namely:
Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters’ roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness.
The Preamble of the Constitution envisages a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law.
How is it even possible that such different prognostications can emerge from the pens of two experienced commentators? A rout in Makhanya’s estimation and, according to Saunderson-Meyer, the “sternest test yet” of SA’s democracy, not because there won’t be a rout, but because “desperate interests” might be allowed to conspire to “triumph” over the will of the electorate as expressed in the voting.
It is not as though the ANC has never lost an election. In the last general elections at national and provincial levels, held as recently as May 2024, the ANC amassed only approximately 40% of the national votes cast by a mere 16% of the electorate. The stay-away non-vote was massive. The Constitution was not immediately torn up; the ANC accepted the outcome as the will of the electorate and negotiated a ten-party national coalition which has held together since mid-2024. Even the 2025 parliamentary revolt against the budget did not end that coalition that goes by the name Government of National Unity (GNU). Generally speaking, democracy of the kind constitutionally contemplated has prevailed and the necessary adaptations to the previous “dominant party state” in which the ANC enjoyed dominance for thirty years have been peacefully affected.
Against this backdrop it is difficult to imagine that a reversal in some metros and in some towns will impel the ANC leadership toward taking drastic action of the kind imagined in the WSM column quoted from above. After all, these are only local government elections in which the stakes are arguably lower than in national or even provincial elections.
The polling of voters in SA is also instructive. When asked by the usually reliable Social Research Foundation, 82% of ANC supporters polled indicated their preference for the formation of coalitions populated by the ANC and DA in hung municipalities. It is expected that many of the electorates in our municipalities will not vote to secure a working majority for any single party through the way in which they cast their votes come 4th November 2026.
There is a feature of the “strategy and tactics” of the ANC which may have some impact on the wildly different predictions made by two experienced commentators. The National Democratic Revolution (NDR), which is still the guiding principle of many ANC leaders, envisages hegemonic control of all the levers of power in society. This goal is a far cry from the multi-party constitutional democracy which is foundational to the post-1994 order in SA. The 82% of ANC supporters (polled by the SRF) who favour the formation of coalitions with the DA at local government level are not informed in their thinking on the matter by the tenets of the NDR. Indeed, the only party in the GNU which embraces the NDR is the ANC. The other major “revolutionary” parties are firmly in the ranks of the opposition to the GNU, being the third and fourth largest parties in parliament – the MKP and the EFF. Less than a third of ANC voters polled would want to see the ANC working in coalition with either of these parties.
In elections it is the perspective of voters that counts, not commentators. No matter how astute the commentators may be, they do not cast more than one vote each. In local government elections it is most unlikely that the type of scenario against which William Saunderson-Meyer warns his readers could materialise. The stakes are simply too low to justify the scale of upheaval he posits.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentza/32859703907/in/photostream/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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