ANC Bleeds Votes, Bosses Huddle to Save Their Seats

The African National Congress took 31 percent of the vote in South Africa's local government elections on 4 November, its lowest score since it came to power in 1994. Eight days later, the party's top brass locked themselves into a special National Executive Committee meeting to figure out what comes next. Not for the people who stood in line to vote. For themselves.

ANC national spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri opened with damage control. "There is a lot of fabrication about the President, that he has offered to resign, we urge South Africans to treat that as such," she said. The party made clear President Cyril Ramaphosa isn't going anywhere.

Who Has the Power

The ANC's vote share fell 15 percentage points. This is a party that once commanded 70 percent of the vote and had no challengers. Two years ago it lost its parliamentary majority in a national election, taking 40 percent. It called that a disaster and a chance for self-reflection. Its supporters kept leaving anyway.

The party's secretary-general called the result a "catastrophic outcome" and promised a period of soul-searching to win back trust. Notice who's doing the reflecting, and who's being asked to forgive. Thirty-two years in power, and the plan is another round of introspection inside a closed room.

Who Gets Crushed

The voters walking away aren't doing it out of fashion. The most pressing problems for many South Africans in 2026 boil down to a failure of basic government services: no electricity in some neighbourhoods, broken or nonexistent water and sewage systems, garbage piling up on streets, and a housing shortage that leaves millions living in shacks.

The ANC has often pointed to the difficulty of reversing nearly a half-century of racist apartheid laws and hundreds of years of European colonialism. That history is real. It's also the same excuse the ruling party has leaned on while the lights stay off and the sewage runs.

What They're Calling "Order"

Now comes the horse-trading. Bhengu-Motsiri said the NEC will receive reports on initial engagements with other parties and consider a mandating guide for adoption, which will set out the mandate for the ANC's appointed negotiations team. Nobody in a shack in Ekurhuleni gets a seat at that table.

The numbers show how scrambled the arrangement has become. Of 213 metropolitan and local councils, 139, or 65 percent, are hung. That's almost double the 70-odd hung councils after the 2021 election. Seven of eight metros have no majority party. Add 44 district councils and the total reaches 257 local governments.

Analyst JP Landman wrote in News24 that councils must constitute themselves by 22 November, just over two weeks after the polls. Four main parties, the ANC, DA, IFP and MK Party, said they'd conduct coalition negotiations centrally. Centrally. Deals about garbage collection and water pipes in Tshwane and eThekwini get cut at party headquarters.

Landman laid out the menu: a coalition following the government of national unity composition, ANC, DA, IFP and smaller parties that took more than 65 percent of the vote, or an ANC pact with the MK Party, EFF, SACP and smaller outfits like the ATM, which together garnered about 20 percent. In eThekwini, Jacob Zuma's MK Party emerged as the biggest party with 38.4 percent, while the three parties forming the KwaZulu-Natal provincial coalition, IFP, ANC and DA, received 54.6 percent there.

The Ballot Box Shuffle

Here's the part the election cheerleaders skip. The ballot did move votes around. Landman wrote that the combined MK Party and EFF vote fell from 24 percent in 2024 to 16 percent, and that coalition rule has replaced one-party dominant rule. His own verdict: "The ANC has declined, but no single party has emerged to fill the vacuum."

A vacuum. After the votes are counted, the same parties that lost the argument get to sit down and divide the councils among themselves. The services people need stay as broken as before, and the people running the negotiations aren't the ones standing in the dark.