Don’t argue with the IEC; it brings receipts.
The ANC discovered that the hard way last week when it took the Electoral Commission of South Africa to court to challenge its exclusion from the ballot in six municipalities after it failed to submit candidate lists for the November local government election by the August 28 deadline.
In the ANC’s view, the fact that it uploaded lists on the IEC portal should be sufficient; never mind that it didn’t actually complete the last step — to submit the lists as final. It also holds that the IEC’s portal clutched out ahead of the 5pm deadline, leaving it unable to submit lists for some municipalities.
Not so, says the IEC. First, it points out that it gave registering parties clear instructions on the process — including the crucial “submit as final” step.
The ANC had no problem following these instructions in the vast majority of cases. In fact, it seems the ANC had no problem submitting lists at all.
Damningly, the IEC presented evidence that the party had been successfully submitting lists as late as 4.57pm, making a mockery of its claim of technical glitches in the system. And it showed how, for some of the municipalities concerned, there hadn’t even been an attempt to submit lists on deadline day; the last action recorded on the portal was on August 27.
Ultimately, like much of the way it has run the country for the better part of 32 years, the ANC simply left things too late. As chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo put it: “A party cannot wait until the last hour before the deadline, then not meet the deadline for six municipalities and attempt to shift the blame elsewhere without any valid basis for doing so.”
Short of some technicality in the law — the ANC says the Municipal Electoral Act doesn’t explicitly recognise the “submit as final” step — it’s hard to see how the party will get its candidates on the ballot ahead of November 4.
Now, the ANC’s lists blunder is no small matter: 51 mayoral candidates were left off the party lists — 23 of them in metros and strategic cities. ANC insiders have told the FM that this is an “unbelievable own goal”, sabotage committed from within.
Perhaps most damagingly, ANC veteran Frank Chikane, apparently the national executive committee’s preferred candidate for Joburg and the person most likely to salvage the party’s fortunes in the metro, was left off the list.
In the ANC strongholds of Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns, not a single ward or proportional representation (PR) candidate was submitted. In the Mangaung metro, the party managed to submit only a ward candidate list — ditto for the Walter Sisulu, uMshwathi and Sunday’s River Valley municipalities.
It’s a deeply damaging moment for Africa’s oldest liberation party that it couldn’t even get it together to contest an election properly. And it points to what the ANC has shown time and again: that the largest political party in the country is defined by ineptitude, mismanagement and factionalism of such grand scale that it is incapable of the most basic business of governing.
For other parties, it is tempting to lapse into schadenfreude. But to do so obscures a greater issue. The ANC has not just failed itself; it has failed the very institution of democracy. As satisfying as it may be to see its fall from grace, this is not the outcome of a democratically decided contest but the disenfranchisement of voters through nothing other than ineptitude.
Take Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns. In the 2021 local government election, the ANC won 71.4% and 73.8% of the vote respectively. In both, the EFF was a distant second, with 8.9% and 6.9% support.
By knocking itself off the ballot, the ANC has denied voters in two of its strongest municipalities the option of voting for the party that attracted more than two-thirds of the vote there in 2021. That could produce councils bearing little resemblance to voters’ preferences at the previous election, in which a party with less than 10% popular support could very conceivably take power.
It’s the same in Mangaung, where the ANC scraped home with 50.63% in 2021. With the PR ballot falling away, it will be lucky to muster 25% of the seats in council. Not exactly reflecting the will of the people.
The ANC — for all its many, many faults — is still the guardian of the dreams and aspirations of millions of South Africans. To celebrate its fall is to render invisible those multitudes. Which is why its list debacle is unforgivable. The party has done a disservice not just to itself but to the very people of South Africa.
