ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula described the election results as catastrophic and acknowledged that the party must take responsibility for local government failures, poor service delivery, internal divisions, and distant representatives. Mbalula addressed the media at the National Results Operations Centre at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand yesterday.
Image: Picture: Itumeleng English / ANA Studio
The ANC, which was once the beacon of intellectualism, hope, transformation and empowerment, has now become a cacophony of crows fighting over a rotting carcass in the desert. The sun is burning them, and there is no hope in that noise.
What we witnessed in these local government elections was not a setback. It was a disastrous showing: a train that has gone over the cliff. even the party's Secretary General said it himself that it was a "catastrophe".
And once again, instead of adapting, and choosing radical change, they will choose to perish. And this time, the time of reckoning has come. Jesus, as they say, in the timeline and world of the ANC, has finally returned.
Remember back in January 2014, when then minister of sport and recreation Fikile Mbalula infamously branded Bafana Bafana a “bunch of losers” after the 3-1 defeat to Nigeria that knocked South Africa out, as hosts, of the 2014 African Nations Championship?
At a press conference on 20 January 2014, he declared: “What I saw was not a problem of coaching, it was a bunch of losers. Their performance was not even lacklustre, it was useless.”
He later said it came from frustration, from a lack of pride in the jersey. Many of us understood the frustration even if we questioned the language.
Well, Mr Mbalula, in the words of Abeid Amani Karume of Zanzibar, the shoe is now on the other foot. As secretary-general, he has presided over the worst showing in the history of the ANC. No plan. No strategy. No accountability. No nothing. It appears that he himself, is now presiding over a bunch of useless losers.
Nationally, the ANC is projected at around 31.7%, with the DA at 25.7% and the MK Party at 9%. That is a fall from nearly 70% of the national vote in 2004, to below 50% for the first time in a local election in 2021, to barely a third now. This is not bad luck. It is the result of years of bad decisions and years without introspection.
Look at what is happening in the metros now. In Johannesburg, the DA is at 38.07%, the ANC at 17.56% and ActionSA at 16.8%. In eThekwini, the MK Party is at 43.79%, the DA at 20.1% and the ANC at 18.7%. These are not just losses. They are humiliations in the very cities where the ANC was built, where its branches live, where its history walks in every street.
The ANC leadership must hang their heads in shame. And shame, if it is real, must lead to action: not another press conference, not another “we have heard the people”, not another promise to introspect at the next elective conference.
Do not wait for the next elective conference
The old, tired, out of touch, stubborn and spent forces of National Executive Committee (NEC) need to go and they need to go now.
I say this because when top black professionals no longer perform or fall out of favour in state-owned entities and the corporate world, they are subjected to witch-hunts and every form of internal and public humiliation imaginable. In the end, many of them do the honourable thing and resign. The NEC must now do the same and allow younger visionaries to take over and implement an urgent turnaround strategy to address the crisis.
To wait for the next elective conference is to choose to perish slowly. It is to tell the millions who stayed home that the ANC is more committed to protecting its leadership than to saving the movement. It is to tell South Africa that positions matter more than the people.
Resignation is not weakness. It is accountability. It is the first honest act this leadership can still perform.
A new leadership, untainted by this failure, must be given the space to do what this NEC cannot do: admit the scale of the collapse, rebuild trust branch by branch and put a credible, deliverable plan before the country, not in two years but in the next 100 days. The party does not need caretakers waiting for a conference. It needs a turnaround leadership with a mandate to act. It needs a bold leader who will go to KwaZulu-Natal, apologize to President Jacob Zuma, restore his membership and bring him back and the party's biggest region back into the fold before it is too late.
What the ANC needs now is divine intervention, but intervention with a political meaning.
In 2024, when it was clear that the national ANC wanted Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal to work with the DA, it was Premier Panyaza Lesufi who refused to follow that decision and formed a government with other parties. That refusal was not stubbornness. It was clarity about who and what the ANC is, and what it stands for. That is the clarity the party needs again: not coalition arithmetic for survival, but a clear political identity rooted in the liberation project.
Let us be honest. MK, the EFF and the ANC are one and the same in origin, in history and in constituency. They come from the same womb. The division is not ideological. It is personal, factional and self-inflicted.
We need to ask ourselves how the black majority is rapidly losing power to a white minority, and the answer will be nonsensical if the ANC does not fix this now. The ANC must take complete accountability for the fractured and fragmented black vote, and for voter apathy among black voters.
Millions of people did not cross over to the opposition. They stayed home. They refused to endorse a system that no longer speaks to them, and they refused to hand their vote to a party they do not trust to transform this country. The result is a split vote that weakens the voting power of black South Africans and strengthens those who were never part of the liberation project.
The ANC cannot blame those voters. It must ask why they no longer believe that voting changes anything in their street, at their tap, in their clinic or in their school.
What the leadership of the ANC needs to understand is that they were deployed to serve. They were not born to be escorted. When a leader arrives in a community with blue lights, an entourage and contempt in his voice, the message is clear: you are a nuisance, not a citizen. No delivery record can survive that attitude.
If the next ANC leader stands up and says “we will introspect”, that leader should seriously question whether they are fit to lead and should possibly resign or be thrown out. ANC members do not need another round of NEC introspection discussions. They need leadership that acts.
The people have spoken. Now the leadership must listen, by applying its own step-aside policy to itself.