If discussions at the last ANC national executive committee meeting are anything to go by, next year's will be the last local government polls held separately from the general election.
According to a proposal that has been put before the party leadership in line with the decision to synchronise national, provincial and local government elections, the terms of the local authorities that would be voted into office next year would be shortened to three years, from the current five.
This would then allow for all three spheres of government to go to synchronised elections in 2024.
Party leaders are selling the proposal to synchronise elections as something that would "enable better co-ordination and implementation of policies across spheres of government".
On this, the ANC has the support of the EFF which, in recent months, goes even further by proposing that next year's polls be postponed to 2024 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Synchronised elections make sense from an EFF perspective as its national leaders - especially its president, Julius Malema - are its strongest support-drawing card during elections. The party tends to do better when campaigning on national political issues than on local affairs.
For the ANC, on the other hand, the appetite for synchronised elections seems to coincide with growing dissatisfaction, even among its core constituencies, at the manner in which party representatives run municipalities.
It seems the party hopes a single election would leave voters so preoccupied with national manifestos and personalities that they would pay very little attention to the quality of candidates being put forward at local level.
While this may help the ANC avoid losing even more municipalities to opposition parties and independents in the future, the question it should be asking itself as it prepares to take the matter to parliament - where it enjoys a comfortable majority - is whether such a move will be at all good for local government.
The ANC has a terrible history of changing institutions and processes if it deems those changes to be politically expedient, no matter the cost to good governance
The ANC has a terrible history of changing institutions and processes if it deems those changes to be politically expedient, no matter the cost to good governance.
Two examples come to mind. The disbandment of the Scorpions and their replacement with the Hawks, just because the party's dominant faction at the time wanted to protect their leader from prosecution, is one.
Then there was the decision to pull out of the International Criminal Court (ICC) - an institution SA had played a major role in pushing for - just because being a member of the court meant we could not have friends like Sudan's Omar al-Bashir over for a Sandton excursion without being compelled to enforce an ICC warrant of arrest.
The party is now having a rethink of both positions. In a desperate attempt to assure the electorate that it is serious about fighting corruption, the ANC is now talking up the need for a "Scorpions-like" agency to be set up to fish out the corrupt.
At the same time, President Cyril Ramaphosa and other influential party leaders are now talking of the need for a "strategic retreat" from the process the party started to withdraw SA from the ICC. This after learning that most of the other African states who are members have no appetite for leaving the ICC, and realising that pulling out would mean SA would not be able to help the Palestinians haul Israel before the same court.
On the local government elections front, the ANC can avoid having to make another embarrassing policy U-turn a few years down the line by adopting a long-term approach rather than being driven by immediate political considerations.
The local government sphere is in dire straits, with 258 of the 278 municipalities said to be experiencing financial strain. Just recently, the auditor-general painted a scary picture of local government in his report aptly titled "Not much to go around, yet not the right hands at the till".
Putting the right hands there is not going to happen through submerging the local government elections in national ones - hence shielding those who have messed up in this sphere by hiding them behind the party flag and the national party leader.
The 2016 elections showed us that, at least at metro level, voters had started voting based on service delivery records rather than on loyalty to parties. Those who were found to be wanting found themselves occupying opposition benches. Keeping local government elections separate from general polls can only help improve this sphere of government over time.
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