ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa has made it clear that the process for selecting mayoral and ward councillor candidates will be tough, as the party wants to field only its best people in the upcoming local government elections.
Ramaphosa said candidates, and mayors in particular, will not get the job merely because they are associated with a certain faction of the ANC.
The president and his “top seven” colleagues will be solely responsible for deciding who becomes the party’s mayoral candidates, especially in the metropolitan municipalities.
Ramaphosa was addressing the ANC national executive committee (NEC) lekgotla in Boksburg on Saturday. Members of provincial executive committees, premiers and mayors are among those attending the three-day gathering.
With almost all metros governed by coalitions, the ANC will this year try to claw back its dwindling support in these municipalities.
The 2021 local government elections dealt the party a body blow, as it lost its majority in a slew of municipalities, including Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni in Gauteng and eThekwini in KwaZulu-Natal. Since then, local government politics has been a game of musical chairs, with mayoral chains continually changing hands.
The interests of the people, comrades, must be primary in everything that we do in the forthcoming local government elections.
— President Cyril Ramaphosa
Ramaphosa said that if the ANC was to stand any chance of regaining its support at the municipal level, it would need to change how it selected its candidates.
All potential candidates will have to possess the skills needed to run municipalities, he said. They will have to undergo mandatory political education, including completing a compulsory ethics course.
“And if we really want to shore up [the] fortunes of the ANC in the local government elections, we must not cut corners [or] take chances, and the usual tendencies we’ve heard [about], [such as] deploying people on a factional basis, must be forgone. This election is going to be important,” Ramaphosa said.
“The interests of the people, comrades, must be primary in everything that we do in the forthcoming local government elections.”
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said the ANC’s national officials — the “top seven” — were looking at a framework they intended to use to select candidates.
“The national officials have been given a mandate to deal with the appointment of mayors, and we are working now on the framework that will guide [us] in executing that work,” he said. “That work is still in the works, but we are gearing ourselves up, including [using] the guidelines we have adopted in terms of the processes of appointing candidates for local government at the ward level and so on.
“The framework is going to guide [us], [so] anyone who [stands] on the ANC platform will be [an ANC person]. But at the same time, our process in itself … infuses the element of public participation. The framework of the mayors will also take that into consideration. But the officials have been given a task that has been endorsed by both the ANC and the national general council that the officials must then execute.”
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