The critique, and what a side-by-side reading shows
Within a day of President Cyril Ramaphosa launching Masakhe at Riverside Park in Diepsloot on 23 August 2026, the critique was already moving online: same party, same promises, new name. It is an understandable reaction to any manifesto from a movement seeking another term. It is also, on the documents themselves, an incomplete one.
Read side by side, the ANC’s 2021 local government manifesto and its 2026 successor show a consistent pattern. The priorities carry over, because the problems carry over: water, roads, electricity, housing land, jobs, clean governance. What changed is the grammar. Where 2021 described intentions, 2026 attaches a number, a date, a named mechanism and, in several cases, a published schedule a resident can read. This is the tenth piece in The People’s Register’s Masakhe series, and the first to read the two documents together.
The comparison below follows the commitments at the level the two texts support. The continuities are stated in both documents. The changes are stated in the 2026 text with its own numbers and deadlines.
One manifesto since Kliptown
The strongest answer to the recycling critique was given two years before Diepsloot, at Luthuli House. In February 2024, after the ANC launched its national election manifesto at Moses Mabhida Stadium and was immediately accused of cutting and pasting old promises, NEC member Zuko Godlimpi put the movement’s case in one sentence. The ANC has one manifesto, a better life for all, and each election brings an iteration of it with a specific focus area.
The one-manifesto argument
“We bring an iteration of the same manifesto with a specific focus area. This is why you interpret it as a cut-and-paste, it’s not. It’s about seamless progress.” Zuko Godlimpi, Luthuli House, February 2024
The argument runs from Kliptown. The Freedom Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People in 1955, remains the movement’s standing programme: the people shall govern, the people shall share in the country’s wealth, the doors of learning and culture shall be opened. A movement that has carried one manifesto since the Charter cannot, for the sake of novelty, abandon commitments made at the level of ideology and principle. The struggles the Charter names are the struggles, until its outcomes are achieved.
Read that way, the 2026 document is exactly what Godlimpi described: the iteration with a specific focus. Masakhe carries the Charter’s commitments into the sphere where they are now hardest pressed, local government, and attaches to each a date and a countable mechanism. Godlimpi, born in the Eastern Cape and the youngest member of the incoming NEC, now serves as Deputy Chairperson of the movement’s Economic Transformation subcommittee. He has also named the test. The first case study of a renewed ANC, he said in 2024, would have to be the 2026 local government elections. The manifesto examined in this piece is that test paper.
What carries over from 2021
The 2026 manifesto presents the 2021 programme as the basis for its own account of the previous five years, and the inheritance is visible commitment by commitment. These themes continue from 2021 into 2026:
- Free basic services for poor and indigent households.
- Improved revenue collection, billing and sound financial management.
- Local economic development and municipal job creation.
- The Community Work Programme and public employment.
- Better roads, water, sanitation, electricity and refuse removal.
- Informal-settlement upgrading and housing closer to economic centres.
- Public participation and councillor accountability, including performance agreements.
- Reduced outsourcing and stronger municipal capacity.
- Anti-corruption and consequence management.
- Support for vulnerable households, and coordination across spheres of government.
Continuity of priorities is not repetition, and it is not an admission either. A water network that leaks is the same hard problem in 2021 and 2026; what residents are entitled to ask is whether the second answer is more checkable than the first. On the evidence of the two texts, it is.
Where 2021 said improve, 2026 says by when
The material changes between the manifestos are rarely changes of policy. They are changes from broad statements to quantified, time-bound mechanisms:
| Promise | 2021 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance | Broad infrastructure-maintenance objective | At least 8% of asset value spent on maintenance, annually, with published plans |
| Water | Reliable services and expanded access | Non-revenue water below 30% in metros, Blue and Green Drop improvement, E. coli elimination |
| Roads | Improve municipal roads | Pothole repair begins within 100 days; monthly repair clock with 85% resolution |
| Complaints | Strengthen public participation | Acknowledged within two working days through a case-management system |
| Participation | Councillor report-backs | Monthly ward meetings, quarterly reports, twice-yearly mayoral Imbizos |
| Youth work | Expand the Community Work Programme | One million opportunities; 10,000 municipal apprenticeships, learnerships and internships |
| Vacancies | Improve municipal capacity | Critical posts filled within 120 days |
| Budgets | Funded budgets and sound management | Unfunded budgets eliminated within two years; billing audit in the first year |
| Audits | Improve audit outcomes | At least 50% of municipalities clean or unqualified by 2031 |
| Debt | Improve revenue collection | Municipal debt and arrears reduced by at least 30% |
| Suppliers | Local procurement and supplier development | Payment within 30 days; 40% women-owned, 20% youth-owned, 3% disability-owned participation by 2031 |
| Corruption | Anti-corruption programmes; officials not doing business with municipalities | Lifestyle audits published annually, the Step Aside Rule, whistleblower protection, MPAC action within 12 months |
Read down the 2026 column and a single design decision repeats: every mechanism is either countable or dated. That is what makes the column reportable, and it is why this publication has organised its series around the numbers and the calendar rather than the slogans.
What is genuinely new
Five commitments in the 2026 manifesto have no equivalent in the 2021 document reviewed for this comparison:
- Umhlaba Wethu, a ward-level public register of municipal land and buildings, complete within 100 days.
- The Ward Delivery Schedule, publishing every project in a ward with its responsible department, value and delivery year.
- The repair clock, a published monthly count of reported faults and resolutions in every ward.
- Written coalition agreements, publicly available, with coalition legislation proposed for hung councils.
- Climate planning in the municipal core: climate needs assessments, climate plans in IDPs, flood-line enforcement and ward early warning.
To these the 2026 text adds the accountability architecture itself: an independent mid-term review of delivery in 2028 and a full Manifesto Delivery Report in 2031. A commitment to publish your own report card is not a standard feature of election manifestos, whatever the decade.
What 2021 said that 2026 does not repeat
Two commitments visible in the earlier programme do not appear in the 2026 text in their previous form. Universal municipal consumer-satisfaction surveys, an accountability tradition from earlier local government manifestos, are not stated as a 2026 target. The Batho Pele Standards Framework, central to the 2021-era service approach, is not presented as a named mechanism.
Both are better read as reshaped than as dropped. The 2026 manifesto replaces the survey instrument and the standards framework with a different tool set. A customer-care system must acknowledge complaints within two working days. A case-management system tracks every report. Publication requirements put response and resolution rates in front of residents, monthly. The promise people first is carried by a different instrument. What the 2026 text omits, this publication records as not repeated, which is a statement about the document, not a claim about policy.
The calendar that makes the difference
The deepest change between the two manifestos is not any single commitment. It is that the 2026 document publishes the checklist against which it asks to be measured:
The checklist, published
A resident can ask in December whether the first ward meeting happened. That question was harder to ask of the 2021 text.
Why the comparison matters
The recycling critique is answered, in the end, not by argument but by dates. If the first 100 days pass without ward committees, or the first year closes without a billing audit, the 2026 text has already named the failure. The 2021 programme, for all its shared priorities, left residents to measure goodwill.
That is the standard this publication will apply for the next five years, and the standard we invite residents to apply with us. The series continues with the questions residents ask most, answered from the document itself, in The Masakhe Manifesto: Your Questions, Answered. The finance commitments are unpacked in How the ANC Plans to Eliminate Unfunded Municipal Budgets.
Compare the two documents yourself
The 2026 manifesto, with every commitment, target and date, is available for download alongside the series.
Sources and further reading
This comparison is drawn from the two manifesto texts and the movement’s public record.
- ANC denies cut, copy and paste claims: Zuko Godlimpi media briefing, IOL, 29 February 2024
- Zuko Godlimpi: the 2026 local government elections as the first test of a renewed ANC, Sunday Times, 8 September 2024
- Masakhe: Let Us Build, ANC 2026 Local Government Elections Manifesto (PDF)
- ANC 2021 local government elections manifesto, via the African National Congress official website
- Ramaphosa Launches ANC’s 2026 Manifesto in Diepsloot, The People’s Register