The ANC is walking into defeat with its eyes wide shut, if the reaction by party insiders to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s hard-hitting address to municipal councillors this week is anything to go by.
But it marks a shift for Ramaphosa himself, for the better. He bravely committed the unthinkable in the eyes of many comrades, including those who view politics as an enrichment sport for themselves and not a calling to serve the people who elect them.
He urged the party’s 4,000-plus councillors to bite the bullet and learn from the DA, because that party must be doing something right to have received clean audit opinions year after year, in the towns and cities they run.
“I can name it here,” said Ramaphosa, “because there’s nothing wrong with competition. We need to ask ourselves, what is it that the DA is doing that is better than what we are doing? And there’s nothing wrong with us saying we want to see what Cape Town is doing. We want to see what Stellenbosch is doing.
“It hurts me deeply when I continue to see that our municipalities sometimes tend to move even backwards. And you are the people who can improve that. The audit outcomes are important. We cannot forever stay at the bottom.”
Ramaphosa went further, saying the ANC faces a stark choice between delivery and death.
He is surely not wrong. Polls by various reputable organisations illustrate that the ANC could be reduced to a mid to low 20% share of the vote in the key cities in the next local government elections. It is a trend backed up by municipal by-election results since the 2024 national election.
Elections analyst Dawie Scholtz has made some key findings through observing by-election trends. The first is that former president Jacob Zuma’s MK Party is making inroads in non-Zulu speaking areas, outside its perceived core constituency.
The second is that the ANC’s support has fallen in townships and traditional strongholds, partly through a likely huge decline in voter turnout.
Even in some urban areas with regularly high voter turnout, the ANC’s support is almost zero. This is a recipe for disaster. It implies that in cities like Joburg, its support could drop to the lower 20s, apparently confirmed by the DA’s own internal snapshot polling.
The reasons for voter disenchantment are not hard to find. One just has to look at the basic standard of service delivery in ANC-run councils.
For instance, the Ditsobotla municipality was in a dire state for ages before the national government intervened this year and placed it under administration — for the ninth time!
The FM visited Ditsobotla two years ago and it was in a terrible condition, with animal carcasses piled on street corners and the municipal building itself without power and almost apocalyptic in its state of disrepair.
The ANC cannot pretend to be surprised by the state of the country’s towns and cities. Ramaphosa used successive auditor-general (AG) reports to illustrate his point. It is not just the latest AG report, but those going back all the way to 2011.
The then AG, Kimi Makwetu, was encouraged, when delivering the 2014-2015 reports, that there had been a marked improvement in audit outcomes between 2011 and 2015. Clean audits had increased from 13 to 57 municipalities. He attributed this positive development to political leadership appointing competent people, and to leaders showing courage in dealing with transgressions and poor performance.
However, a year later, this leadership evidently evaporated and the gains were slowed or reversed.
Only 41 councils have clean audits in the latest report. It showed that 18 of these (17 in the Western Cape and one in Midvaal in Gauteng) are DA-run and had achieved a clean audit status for four consecutive years or more.
Hearing the truth from Ramaphosa must have been a shock to ANC structures, subsumed in the everyday toil of maintaining power and privilege for a select few and neglecting their core responsibilities to those they are meant to serve.
The DA naturally pounced on the praise, citing it as evidence of its superiority at governance and delivery.
ANC councillors and national ANC leaders immediately went on the offensive. National executive committee member Khusela Diko said she suspected “the president was misled on this one”.
In an opinion piece for the Sowetan, ANC head of policy and research Fébé Potgieter-Gqubule said “the DA’s triumphalism over this statement is not only misplaced, it is a distortion of the context and meaning of the president’s marching orders”.
The ANC will likely bubble over with outrage internally about Ramaphosa’s comments, seething that he had had the gall to praise the “enemy,” with his opponents within the party probably crowing that they had been “proved right” about him being a “white puppet”.
But Ramaphosa might ask, who cares? He cannot stand for another term as president and has little to lose internally. Now is his time to speak plainly to those resisting real change internally.
He also remains the strongest candidate (even though hugely weakened since 2018) inside the ANC to front an election campaign.
South Africa needs more of this kind of truth-telling from its first citizen, outside the shackles of internal ANC intrigue.
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