For the people of Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns, the ANC’s candidate-list blunder is not primarily a story about the ANC.
It is a story about them.
For years, politics in parts of the Eastern Cape has seemed less like a contest than a permanent condition. The ANC has dominated local government for generation after generation. Yet the basic economic circumstances of many residents remain extraordinarily difficult.
In Port St Johns, only 19% of households had piped water inside their homes in the 2022 census. In Ingquza Hill, access to water remains a daily problem.
Behind those numbers are households where social grants are the economic foundation, where young people reach adulthood without a job and where development remains what it has long been — a promise.
Because the ANC failed to submit some candidate lists by the deadline, voters in six municipalities are heading into the November 4 local elections with an electoral map their politicians did not expect.
The Electoral Court on September 16 rejected the ANC’s application to restore 181 candidates. The affected municipalities are Ingquza Hill, Port St Johns, Mangaung metro, uMshwathi, Walter Sisulu and Sundays River Valley. The party says it will exercise its legal rights.
In Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns, the consequences are starkest: the ANC has no ward or proportional representation candidates. In 2021 it won 46 of Ingquza Hill’s 64 council seats, and 31 of the 39 in Port St Johns.
The political establishment may spend the next few weeks asking which opposition party will benefit.
That is the wrong question.
What happens to voters when the party that has dominated their municipality for decades is suddenly no longer an option?
It is tempting to read this as an electoral gift to whichever opposition party can capture the displaced ANC vote. But the opportunity is bigger than that. Voters can ask every party seeking their support something more uncomfortable, “What exactly will you do with this place?"
Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns possess assets that most municipalities would envy.
The Wild Coast is one of the country’s great natural assets. Port St Johns already describes itself as the centre of Wild Coast tourism, with opportunities around its coastline, beaches, fishing and natural environment.
Yet the surrounding communities remain among the country’s poorest.
That contradiction should embarrass every political party.
The region should not have to choose between development and environmental protection as though the only alternatives were a mine or poverty. The political challenge is to build a development model in which local communities have a stake in the economic value of their land and natural resources.
At Xolobeni, communities have fought for nearly two decades over a proposed titanium mine on the Wild Coast. The dispute has become a national symbol of the conflict between mining, environmental protection, community rights and economic development. The Pretoria high court’s 2018 Baleni judgment held that the affected community’s full and informed consent was required before a mining right could be granted over land it occupied.
But after all those years, the fundamental question remains unanswered:
How do you turn the natural wealth of the Wild Coast into economic opportunity for the people who live there?
That requires political leadership. Not slogans about transformation. Not promises made at election time. And not another decade of arguing while young people remain unemployed.
Mangaung shows the same failure inland.
Bloemfontein should be one of the country’s great inland economic centres. Instead, the metro has been under provincial intervention since 2019, escalated to national intervention in 2022. The National Treasury’s recovery plan describes deteriorating infrastructure and serious financial and service-delivery problems.
Potholes and dry taps are the visible part. The cost is economic.
A city cannot attract investors while its basic infrastructure deteriorates. Businesses cannot create jobs indefinitely where municipal failure becomes a cost of doing business.
The candidate-list fiasco matters beyond the ANC. It has put governance on the ballot.
The DA will point voters to uMngeni in KwaZulu-Natal as evidence that municipal government can change within a single electoral cycle. Its claims of improved audits and higher infrastructure spending should be judged against the municipality’s records. The lesson does not belong to the DA alone.
Municipal performance can change.
Voters in the six municipalities have choices. Some may choose the DA, EFF, MK, or another party. Others may choose local independents. The ANC’s absence in the two Wild Coast municipalities does not leave an empty ballot.
And fragmentation carries its own risks.
A party that has never governed a municipality has no municipal record against which voters can judge its promises. Running one requires competent administrators, credible budgets, infrastructure maintenance and procurement controls.
Voters should ask which party can run a municipality. Can it maintain roads and water infrastructure? Can it produce credible budgets and account for public money? Can it turn a municipality’s assets into opportunities for the people who live there?
The ANC’s candidate-list failure was a self-inflicted wound. It has also broken, at least for this election, the assumption that the political status quo is inevitable.
In Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns, the ANC cannot ask voters to back its candidates. The opposition therefore has to persuade them to vote for something.
The people of the Wild Coast do not need another promise that their turn is coming. They need evidence that somebody knows how to make it happen.