The ANC in Gauteng has taken control of the province’s three large metros for the first time since 2016, in a high-stakes gambit less than two years before the next local government election.
Gauteng is shaping up, once again, to be a key battleground in the 2026 poll and the ANC’s own succession race leading to its 2027 national conference.
After Ekurhuleni and Joburg, Tshwane was the last metro to fall back into ANC hands, when the DA’s Cilliers Brink was removed last week in a motion of no confidence and replaced by ActionSA’s Nasiphi Moya.
Announcing her cabinet at the weekend, Moya assigned five crucial portfolios to the ANC, two to her own party representatives and one to Patricia de Lille’s GOOD. The EFF also forms part of the mayoral committee in Tshwane for the first time and Moya appointed the party to head the health portfolio and the environment & agriculture department.
The deal sees the ANC heading the big-budget and key-services portfolios, including housing & human settlements, roads & transport, utility services, community & social development, and finance. ActionSA retained one crucial portfolio, community safety, where it could make its mark ahead of the election in just under two years.
ActionSA has put forward a host of reasons for its shift towards the ANC after it shared power with the DA in Tshwane, where Moya was Brink’s deputy.
Party leader Herman Mashaba told journalists on Monday that ActionSA simply “struck first” to protect itself against the DA.
“They are the ones who started this; we needed to defend ourselves ... We thought at the time we were in a stable coalition with the DA; we had the numbers in Tshwane. All of a sudden, it comes to our attention that the DA wanted to end our life, they wanted us to become another Agang or COPE ... we said we had to protect ourselves and that is what we did,” Mashaba says.
Brink has opted to remain in the opposition benches in Tshwane, likening the situation there to a “doomsday pact” in which the ANC and the EFF are in control under the guise of a “proxy mayor” from a small party.
A similar scenario played out in Joburg and Ekurhuleni, where the ANC and EFF ran the cities with Al Jama-ah and the African Independent Congress holding the mayoral seats. The effects were disastrous, and this year, due to internal pressure from its regional structures, the ANC installed its own members in the mayoral posts in those cities.
Brink says: “ActionSA’s mayor Nasiphi Moya will be in office, but she will not be in power. Her strings will be pulled by the ANC and EFF. This is not a commentary on her skill or qualifications. She was a capable deputy mayor in the Tshwane multiparty coalition, which her party brought to a fall.”
The ANC in Gauteng welcomed Moya’s election, saying it came at a crucial time as the city is confronted by governance challenges and a deep financial crisis.
“The city’s finances have been in a perilous state since the advent of the DA-led coalition government that governed Tshwane for the past eight years and left a devastating impact on service delivery; the finances of the city brought down the morale of workers and overall governance in the city of Tshwane,” ANC provincial secretary TK Nciza says.
The DA says the financial crunch in the city is due to the unlawful placing of Tshwane under administration by the ANC provincial government, led by premier Panyaza Lesufi, in 2020. It was Lesufi who also engineered the DA’s removal from all three metros.
ActionSA’s mayor Nasiphi Moya will be in office, but she will not be in power. Her strings will be pulled by the ANC in the Gauteng factions and by the EFF
— Cilliers Brink
Brink says after the Gauteng provincial government withdrew from Tshwane, it had accrued a budget deficit of over R4bn, which it then blamed on the DA. The DA-led administration was also saddled with a R4.5bn VAT penalty due to a now set aside smart meter contract under the ANC government in 2012, he says.
The ANC says the DA had ignored townships and poorer communities in the city, a critique with which ActionSA has concurred. Party chair Michael Beaumont says a large chunk of the 8% of ActionSA voters are from townships, which the party could no longer ignore.
All three parties have justified their choices in Tshwane, but the political chess game at play will have far-reaching consequences for them, both within their parties and with the broader electorate.
Lesufi and Nciza are quickly becoming a rallying point for those inside the ANC who are opposed to the ANC tie-up with the DA at a national level — and opposed to ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula winning in the upcoming race to succeed President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Lesufi has worked hard to ensure the DA is excluded from the government of provincial unity through offering the party three minor portfolios and then arguing to national leaders that it was the opposition party which opted out of the talks to form a government similar to that at national level.
The reasons for this could be that Lesufi could see the DA as the ANC’s clearest threat in the province, or, as some in both the ANC and the DA argue, the party in Gauteng has too many skeletons in its closet for leaders in the province and nationally to share power with the erstwhile official opposition. Lesufi and his allies prefer a tie-up with Jacob Zuma’s MK Party and the EFF.
The DA, for its part, has played it coy in Gauteng, or simply not played at all, taking for granted its urban support there, without pushing to make inroads into townships. It is the only province outside the Western Cape that the DA has a shot at winning, yet it consistently fields mediocre candidates at all levels in the province. Insiders argue that Gauteng’s challenges are simply too vast to make a difference quickly.
Independent political analyst Prof Susan Booysen, who co-runs a coalition monitor at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, says the constant game of mayoral musical chairs in Gauteng metros does not bode well for those cities. She says it does not improve the quality of delivery at local government — with political shifts come changes to the administration, which is the engine room of service delivery at local level.
“Another crop of parties won’t make a difference ... it is actually bad for democracy,” she says.
Having observed similar shifts in councils in KwaZulu-Natal, Booysen says the result of those moves is that most of those councils are almost bankrupt. Their tax bases are so weak that they are barely able to pay Eskom and the water boards that provide key services. They use the little they collect to pay municipal workers. As a result, infrastructure is neglected because it is low down on the list of priorities for administrators seeking to simply make ends meet.
The impact is glaring — and unfolding before us in the looming water crisis in Joburg, for instance.
So why the shifts in power in the run-up to an election, when it is virtually impossible to make a marked difference in such a short time?
Booysen says the electoral battle over the next two years will be fought in the realm of propaganda and campaigns. She says even if there is no outright corruption in that time, there are ways to boost political party campaigns using state resources, which parties in power can take advantage of. This is likely at the heart of the ANC’s push to regain control of the big-budget metros, when the municipalities it controls, such as Emfuleni, are broke, in deep disrepair and riddled with corruption.
Voters have shown they are willing to more readily switch allegiances at local level. In just two years’ time, the electorate will deliver its verdict about the power plays in Gauteng metros.
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