Goodbye ANC, Goodbye Comrades, You Did This to Yourselves
PRETORIA — Five years ago, South Africans gave the ANC a warning it could count. For the first time since 1994, fewer than half the votes cast in a municipal election went to the movement that had helped win the right to vote itself. In 2024, it lost its parliamentary majority too. If this election costs the ANC another city, or leaves it asking smaller parties for permission to govern places it once won outright, comrades, you cannot say the people failed to tell you. You had an entire council term to win them back.
There is grief in saying goodbye to the ANC. For many South Africans, it was the first party they were free to put a cross beside. That memory belongs as much to the people who stood in those queues as it does to the leaders who took office afterwards. Somewhere along the way, the party began treating the two as though they were the same thing. A citizen can cherish what that first vote meant and use this one to remove an ANC councillor. In fact, the freedom to do exactly that is among the movement’s greatest achievements.
Five years to earn back one household
Consider Johannesburg. The day before the election, Mayor Dada Morero said 18 months of campaigning had convinced him that the ANC’s support remained strong. At a briefing the previous afternoon, he had acknowledged that some households had gone more than ten days without water. His teams were adjusting flows, clearing airlocks and trying to refill reservoirs without draining them again. That work mattered. So did the fact that, on the eve of an election, a resident could give a more precise answer to how long the ANC had been campaigning than to when water would return to the kitchen tap.
This is what reacting late costs a governing party. By the time a mayor explains how a reservoir works, the family listening has already fetched water, rearranged washing days and found somewhere else for a child to bathe. The explanation may be technically sound. It still arrives after the household has done the municipality’s work for it. Across South Africa, municipalities disclosed R14.73 billion in water losses in 2024/25. The Auditor-General found that four years into the council term, mayors and councils had made limited progress in strengthening governance and improving services. That finding covers councils led by several parties. ANC leaders owe an account for the ones they ran.
Then there is the looting. South Africans have heard the word accountability so often that it is worth recalling what an actual consequence looks like. In 2024, former VBS Mutual Bank chair Tshifhiwa Matodzi was convicted and sentenced for his role in the looting of the bank into which municipalities had deposited public money. His was a criminal conviction for his own conduct. The political question for the ANC is what it did, in the years after the scandal, to persuade residents that the people entrusted with their municipality’s money could be trusted again. A speech condemning corruption is easy to deliver. Following the money, publishing what was recovered and explaining who was held responsible would give residents something they could judge for themselves.
The defeat a coalition agreement cannot repair
The ANC may still emerge as the largest party across the country. It may keep important councils and negotiate its way back into office in others. Opposition parties have their own records to defend, particularly in cities where coalition partners spent precious time fighting over who should govern. A change of mayor offers residents little comfort if the same pipe is still leaking three months later.
But there is a loss that no coalition agreement can repair. It comes when a lifelong ANC supporter walks into a voting booth, chooses somebody else and discovers that doing so carries no sense of betrayal. The betrayal, in that voter’s reckoning, happened earlier. It happened when public money disappeared, when warnings became annual findings, and when the urgency that was missing for much of a council term finally appeared in the campaign.
The final results will tell us where the ANC can still elect a mayor. They cannot tell us how many former supporters spent these five years hoping the party would give them a reason to stay. That is the sadness of a great liberation movement facing the possibility of another defeat. Plenty of people who may now say goodbye once wanted you to succeed. You had five years, comrades. What did you give them to take into the voting booth besides a memory?