ANC infighting over the party’s failure to submit complete candidate lists for the local government elections has intensified, with some party leaders calling for secretary-general Fikile Mbalula to be removed from his position.
Sources who spoke to Africa Daily on condition of anonymity said some members of the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) want Mbalula to take personal responsibility for the handling of the candidate-list process and be removed because his failure to submit the list is a gross dereliction of duty that left the governing party at risk of being excluded from contests in wards it has traditionally controlled.
The disgruntled NEC members intend to push for Mbalula’s leadership to be debated when the NEC next meets.
Their demands come after allegations that the ANC submitted incomplete candidate lists in parts of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State.
The party has attributed the problems to a technical glitch, but the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has rejected that explanation and ruled out reopening its nomination system.
ANC NEC member Mondli Gungubele publicly criticised the party’s failure, describing it as a serious organisational embarrassment.
In a social media post, Gungubele said the ANC’s inability to submit municipalities and complete candidate lists reflected badly on the organisation and its leadership.
“The failure to submit municipalities and a set of candidates to the IEC is a scandalous incident that cannot be joked about. As leadership, if we cannot be embarrassed by this, we aren’t worth the idea,” he said.
Those pushing for action against Mbalula believe the candidate-list crisis is connected to his reported ambitions to succeed President Cyril Ramaphosa as ANC president at the party’s elective conference in December 2027.
They alleged the delay was caused his apparent intention to chose the people who will support his ambition to become the party’s next president.
The NEC member said the matter should be placed on the agenda of the next meeting so that Mbalula’s performance could be scrutinised.
Mbalula, however, has defended his management of the candidate-selection process.
ANC leaders in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal have separately raised concerns that the party failed to register candidates in several municipalities, potentially preventing it from contesting elections in areas where it has historically enjoyed strong support.
The Eastern Cape appears to have been among the provinces most affected, with reports indicating problems in municipalities across OR Tambo, Alfred Nzo, Amathole and Joe Gqabi.
An Eastern Cape ANC provincial executive committee member raised the alarm in a leadership WhatsApp group after discovering that several candidate lists may not have been registered.
The member said party officials had been informed of a technical problem that resulted in several lists not being registered.
ANC leaders in Walter Sisulu Local Municipality said the party needed to accept what had happened and consider which alternative candidates its supporters should vote for.
The leaders said ANC officials needed to be realistic about the possibility that the party could be absent from the ballot in some areas.
Eastern Cape ANC secretary Lulama Ngcukayitobi has also taken issue with the handling of the candidate submissions.
Ngcukayitobi wrote a strongly worded letter to Mbalula this week, demanding answers from the ANC secretariat about the process and seeking clarity on what was submitted, who submitted it and when the submissions were made.
He also rejected suggestions that the province should shoulder the blame for the electoral crisis.
In KwaZulu-Natal, ANC leaders were concerned that the party had failed to submit proportional-representation candidates.