The ANC in Johannesburg took its fight to retain the metro directly to the doorsteps of Ivory Park on Friday, with Deputy President Paul Mashatile leading a door-to-door campaign in Tembisa to shore up support and urge residents to vote in next month’s local government elections.
With less than a month to go before South Africans head to the polls in November, Mashatile traded a rally stage for household visits – walking through cramped streets and sitting in residents’ homes to hear complaints about housing, water and electricity.
“I am confident the ANC will do well,” Mashatile said, as volunteers in yellow, green and black fanned out across the area.
The visit is part of a renewed ANC Johannesburg regional strategy to rebuild its ground game in townships where voter turnout collapsed in 2024 and where service delivery anger has cost the party dearly in metros.
ANC member Sasabona Manganye said the deputy president’s presence had lifted morale on the ground.
“As you can see yourself, the number of volunteers of the ANC who came out, because one of the key contributing factors is that when leadership is here, it uplifts the morale of the volunteers to come out in numbers to make sure that they speak to their community members to vote for the ANC,” Manganye told Africa Daily.
Manganye conceded that housing remains the biggest complaint in Ivory Park, a rapidly growing settlement on Johannesburg’s northern edge, but argued that the ANC-led government had made progress on formalisation, roads and basic services.
“There are those concerns that they have raised, issues of housing, which we have noted,” he said.
Ivory Park’s frustrations mirror those of many Johannesburg townships: families sharing overcrowded RDP houses, illegal and shared electricity connections, and intermittent water supply. Those issues are now central to the local government election battle, where the ANC is trying to win back Johannesburg without an outright majority since 2021.
For supporters like David Lesiba, Mashatile’s visit was a call for unity behind the party’s campaign.
“The campaign that is led by the Deputy President, we want everyone to rally behind him until the elections are done and go unified to the national elections,” Lesiba said.
The ANC Johannesburg region said the door-to-door programme is aimed at direct voter contact, volunteer mobilisation and voter education – encouraging residents not just to support the ANC, but to exercise their constitutional right to vote at all.
The party is under pressure. Johannesburg has been governed by unstable coalitions since 2021, with service delivery deteriorating and residents increasingly sceptical of all parties. The ANC’s message in Ivory Park was that it is listening again, and that local government – responsible for water, electricity reticulation, housing lists and roads – is where change must happen.