Community Safety Forums: The ANC’s Monthly Plan for Every Hotspot

Safety becomes a municipal job

Policing is a national competence. Community safety, the ANC’s 2026 manifesto insists, is a municipal one. The distinction is the whole of Action Three, and its central instrument gives the argument a name, a convener and a standing date: the Community Safety Forum, convened by the mayor, meeting monthly, with a lighting, policing and camera plan for every hotspot.

This is the fifth piece in The People’s Register’s Masakhe series, after the 100-days timeline, the 8% maintenance rule and the one-million opportunities explained. Action Three turns from services and jobs to the spaces where people live: safer, cleaner, healthier, more resilient.

What separates this action area from a policing manifesto is its breadth. Street lighting, parks, taxi ranks, cemeteries, sports facilities and community halls are all safety commitments. So are waste reclaimers with fair compensation, flood-line mapping, stormwater maintenance on a published schedule and early-warning systems in every ward.

What Action Three promises

The action area’s measurable commitments:

The forum, and why the mayor convenes it

The Community Safety Forum is the action area’s structural innovation, and the manifesto’s first-100-days commitment sets its clock: convened within 100 days of a new council taking office. Its membership brings the parties who between them hold every lever of local safety: SAPS, Community Policing Forums, neighbourhood watches, schools, businesses, faith-based organisations, and traditional and Khoi and San leadership.

The mayor convenes, the manifesto says, because the municipality owns the assets safety depends on: the street lights, the cameras, the public spaces, the stormwater systems, the refuse fleet. No single partner can deliver a safer neighbourhood on its own. The forum is where the parts meet, and the hotspot plan is what it produces: a named location, a lighting plan, a policing plan and a camera plan, reviewed monthly.

The hotspot plan is what makes the forum more than a talking shop. It is a document with a place name on it, reviewed at a standing monthly date, and this publication will ask for it.

Beyond policing: the breadth of Action Three

The action area commits to measurably reducing infrastructure theft, extortion and vandalism. It requires municipalities to publicly report by-law, traffic and law-enforcement activity, complaint volumes and resolution rates, turning enforcement from a press release into a recurring dataset.

The waste economy carries a specific dignity commitment: waste reclaimers, the manifesto says, must be integrated into municipal waste systems with fair compensation. Recycling drop-off points and buy-back centres expand, alongside separation-at-source and waste-to-value initiatives.

For homeless residents, the action area commits to access to shelters, social services and reintegration programmes. For vulnerable households, it requires updated indigent registers connected to relief services. Hijacked buildings are to be reclaimed lawfully. Each commitment has a population the reader can picture.

The social-cohesion dimension deserves its own weight. The action area commits to dialogue programmes that bring communities together across the lines that divide them, in a metro where those lines are real. A municipality that convenes the conversations is a municipality practising a particular kind of politics, and the manifesto has chosen its instrument: the integrated safety, disaster-management and social-cohesion programme that every ANC-led municipality must implement.

Resilience: the chapter readers may miss

The climate-resilience section of the manifesto sits inside Action Three, and it is the part most likely to be missed in coverage that equates safety with policing alone. It commits every ANC-led municipality to community early-warning systems in every ward, updated flood-line mapping included in spatial plans and land-use schemes, and stormwater systems maintained on a published schedule.

For a coastal metro with a flooding history, these are not peripheral commitments. The stormwater schedule is a document a resident can ask for. The flood-line maps are planning instruments with legal weight. The early-warning systems are tested in the first heavy rain, not in a manifesto launch.

The early-warning commitment is the one that most directly touches every household in the metro. A ward-level system that warns residents before a flood arrives, rather than after the water has, is the difference between a weather report and a public-safety instrument. The manifesto’s language is specific: every ward, under the climate-resilience section, not a pilot or a preferred district.

The Bay’s test

Nelson Mandela Bay’s safety profile runs from street lighting outages to infrastructure vandalism, from illegal dumping to flood-prone settlements. Each maps to a named Action Three commitment, and the manifesto’s instruments are specific: the hotspot plan with its lighting, policing and camera components, the published stormwater schedule, the enforcement data.

The metro’s safety landscape includes some of the most visible service-delivery failures residents experience: dark streetlights on commute routes, uncollected refuse in residential areas, and stormwater blocked long before the summer rains. Each maps to a named commitment, and each is the kind of thing a ward-level forum with a published hotspot plan would have to name and address. That is the action area’s quiet radicalism: it takes problems residents see every day and gives them a standing meeting with a responsible convener.

The first test is the forum itself. Does the new mayor convene it within 100 days? Does it meet monthly? Does it produce a hotspot plan with named locations, and does the plan change anything on the ground? Those questions are the action area’s entire promise, reduced to a calendar entry and a document, and this publication will ask them.

Sources and further reading

This explainer is based on the ANC’s 2026 Local Government Elections Manifesto, Masakhe: Let Us Build, Action Three (pages 31 to 36) and its climate-resilience chapter (page 54), on this desk’s commitment-by-commitment review of the document, and on official records previously reported for Nelson Mandela Bay.

• Download the manifesto: Masakhe, Let Us Build (PDF, 65 pages)
• The People’s Register: One Million Opportunities Explained
• The People’s Register: What Masakhe’s First 100 Days Will Look Like in Your Ward

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