The freedom to reject the liberation party is itself a fruit of liberation. Once voters must remain loyal to prove their gratitude, freedom becomes a debt they can never repay.
Helen Zille believes the DA could take 40% of Johannesburg’s vote and emerge as its largest party for the first time. Speaking to eNCA on Thursday, she rejected the broadcaster’s suggested maximum of 36%. Her projection would still leave the DA needing coalition partners, but it points to a historic displacement of the ANC in the country’s economic capital.
Beyond the seats and coalition arithmetic lies a changing relationship between the ANC and the people whose history it once seemed entitled to represent.
D.M. Jongilanga’s novel, Ukuqhawuka kwembeleko, offers an evocative image: the breaking of the bond that once carried and sustained us. In political terms, this is the severing of the umbilical cord.
The separation has been years in the making. The ANC’s aggregate municipal vote fell from about 62% in 2011 to 53.9% in 2016 and 45.6% in 2021. The CSIR’s first projection on November 5 put it at about 31.7%, based on 13% of voting districts declared. If that holds, the party will have lost roughly half its 2011 vote share.
The count remains provisional. A projection is not a result, and early leads cannot be converted into mayoralties. But the trajectory is unmistakable: the ANC’s inherited authority is losing its electoral value.
Bargaining for influence
“We may even be double the size of the ANC,” Zille said. That remains her assessment pending the completed count. But the reversal she describes is extraordinary: Mandela’s party bargaining for influence in the economic capital it once dominated.
Zille’s coalition comments were equally revealing. Negotiations would be conducted nationally, with her consulted. She opposed reproducing the national government’s six- or seven-party arrangement, but declined to rule particular partners in or out.
Her objection was to a sprawling coalition, and she has left an ANC partnership open.
The ANC could therefore help install a DA mayor in Johannesburg, retaining influence through negotiation after losing electoral primacy. That would be legitimate coalition politics. It would not, however, restore the relationship with voters that once made such negotiations unnecessary.
The broader map carries a bitter historical irony. The movement that fought to reunite South Africa risks finding its remaining strongholds increasingly concentrated in smaller towns, rural municipalities and former Bantustan territories.
It means the ANC could end up owning apartheid geography.
Apartheid sought to deny black South Africans a permanent political claim to the country’s economic centres, assigning them instead to fragmented territories on its margins. The ANC’s ambition was national: one citizenship, one country, a shared claim to its wealth.
But as its metropolitan authority drains away, it risks becoming increasingly dependent on communities living with the deepest legacies of that exclusion.
Geographically extensive, economically weak
This is an emerging pattern, not a completed map. Secondary cities are not synonymous with former homelands, and the ANC retains voters far beyond both. But a party can remain geographically extensive while losing its commanding position in the places where employment, industry and municipal revenue concentrate.
Rural voters deserve no condescension. Liberation history, social protection, local organisation and the credibility of alternatives all matter. The failure belongs to a movement that has struggled to turn formal citizenship into economic inclusion.
Nor is the former homeland belt a guaranteed refuge. MK’s strength in KwaZulu-Natal demonstrates that another party can compete for those loyalties using the language and personalities of liberation itself.
Leaving the ANC does not necessarily mean leaving liberation politics. Some voters are transferring allegiance within the family. What is breaking is the ANC’s claim to be its sole legitimate representative.
Gauteng presents a different challenge. In Ekurhuleni, where the ANC won about 38% in 2021, early returns have placed it around 17%, behind the DA and competing with ActionSA. Those numbers will move as counting proceeds. The vulnerability they expose is nevertheless substantial.
Herman Mashaba offers a qualification to the DA’s historic advance. Speaking to me, he argued that ActionSA was performing strongly in Soweto and among black suburban voters, including in areas where the DA was winning overall. His assessment must be tested against the completed ward results. But it identifies the contest beneath the citywide totals: who is winning the black voters loosening their attachment to the ANC?
The ActionSA factor
The DA could become Johannesburg’s largest party while ActionSA makes inroads into communities once central to ANC dominance. These are different breakthroughs, with different implications for coalition negotiations.
Mashaba is positioning ActionSA as a political home for black urban voters who want to leave the ANC without joining the DA. If the results substantiate his account, he will negotiate with a claim to represent an emerging constituency. The ANC can no longer assume that black aspiration finds its natural political home within the movement.
The lost vote is fragmenting. The CSIR’s first national projection put the DA at roughly 26%, MK at 9%, the EFF at 6% and ActionSA at 5%. There is no single successor inheriting the ANC’s old electoral coalition.
Recovery means confronting different competitors in different communities. A national slogan cannot repair failures experienced through particular taps, roads and municipal offices.
Roger Southall’s comparative study, Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa, supplies a deeper explanation. Examining the ANC, Swapo and Zanu-PF, he distinguishes organisational survival from survival as a progressive force. A movement can retain its machinery while exhausting its emancipatory purpose.
His analysis exposes a central tension: movements that help secure democratic rights can develop authoritarian claims to represent the nation. Applied here, the question is whether the ANC understands voters’ departure as democratic choice or historical betrayal.
Dry taps trump history
For decades, voting ANC could express family history and gratitude to those who paid for freedom with imprisonment, exile or death. But a dry tap changes that relationship. So does sewage outside a school or another municipal contract enriching the politically connected.
The decisive shift comes when changing one’s vote ceases to feel like betrayal.
For the ANC, that shift will sharpen the succession contest ahead of its December 2027 conference. Delegates must decide whether the next leader’s qualification is command of the branches or the capacity to persuade people who have stopped voting ANC.
Those are increasingly different electorates.
Municipal negotiations will also sharpen the national argument over partners: accommodation with the DA, or arrangements with MK, the EFF and smaller parties.
Changing partners cannot substitute for rebuilding consent. Nor can the opposition treat disillusionment as a renewable resource. Becoming the largest party gives the DA a stronger claim to lead Johannesburg. It also raises the standard against which its performance must be judged.
A changed mayor means little if infrastructure deteriorates, officials remain unaccountable and procurement becomes the next coalition’s spoils system. Electoral freedom must produce governments that function.
November 4 may be remembered as a decisive stage in the severing of an inherited political bond. The break is uneven, and the count unfinished. But citizens are demonstrating that they can cherish history without renewing the contract.
The ANC helped win South Africans the right to choose their government. It must now live with their freedom to choose someone else.