The number, and what it says
The ANC’s 2026 manifesto quantifies its local jobs promise, and the words it chooses matter. One million work, training and enterprise opportunities between 2026 and 2031: work, training and enterprise, three categories, counted separately.
The manifesto does not claim one million permanent jobs, and the distinction is the measure of the document’s seriousness. A promise that says exactly what it counts can be checked against exactly what it counts.
This is the fourth piece in The People’s Register’s Masakhe series, after the 100-days timeline and the 8% maintenance rule. Action Two turns from services to the economy: investment, jobs and local economic development.
What Action Two promises
The action area’s measurable commitments:
| Commitment | Target |
|---|---|
| One million work, training and enterprise opportunities | 2026 to 2031, across EPWP, CWP, enterprise and training programmes |
| Municipal apprenticeships, learnerships and internships | 10,000 people, in plumbing, electrical, welding, fitting and turning, and heavy-plant operation |
| Supplier payment | Every compliant, legitimate supplier paid within 30 days |
| Procurement participation | By 2031: 40% women-owned, 20% youth-owned and 3% disability-owned enterprises |
| Local Enterprise and Innovation Hubs | One in every ANC-led metropolitan municipality and district |
| LED one-stop desks | Every municipality, with annual measurable targets |
| Business services | Digitised, with published turnaround times |
How a million is counted
The opportunities arrive through named instruments. The Expanded Public Works Programme and the Community Work Programme, expanded and aligned with municipal maintenance and service delivery, so that public employment builds the assets the 8% rule maintains. The apprenticeship pipeline, 10,000 strong, in the trades municipalities themselves depend on: plumbing, electrical, welding, fitting and turning, heavy plant.
The manifesto attaches conditions that decide whether the number means anything. Public employment programmes must comply with labour law and provide genuine skills development. Apprenticeships must be linked to qualifying permanent appointments, not to a certificate and a handshake.
That is the standard this publication will track: opportunities reported by category, work, training and enterprise, with the share that converts into lasting employment. A number reported honestly is the movement’s own method, and it is the method the rest of this series follows.
The 30-day rule
For the smallest businesses in the local economy, the action area’s most consequential line is also its simplest: every compliant and legitimate supplier paid within 30 days.
Late payment is how municipalities quietly bankrupt the enterprises they claim to develop. A contractor who waits 90 days for an invoice carries the municipality’s cash flow on a bank overdraft. The 30-day rule, paired with the manifesto’s commitment to blacklist suppliers who fail to deliver, makes payment discipline economic policy, and it is checkable from any municipality’s payment records.
Who gets the work
Action Two turns procurement into an explicit instrument of economic transformation. By 2031, the manifesto targets procurement participation of 40% from women-owned enterprises, 20% from youth-owned enterprises and 3% from disability-owned enterprises, with public reporting.
The one-stop desks, enterprise hubs, affordable trading spaces and productive reuse of underused municipal buildings and land carry the same logic: the municipality does not only regulate the local economy, it hosts it, finances its entry points and buys from it.
The Bay’s test
Nelson Mandela Bay enters this action area with unemployment at 33.1% by mid-2026, among the sharpest deteriorations of any metro, and youth unemployment near 46% across the province, as this publication has reported. The Business Chamber has described the metro’s economic position as a structural crisis.
The metro’s strengths are real: a manufacturing and automotive base that depends on exactly the reliable services Action One commits to, a port, and an enterprise hub commitment that now arrives with a number and a deadline. The questions this series will ask are the manifesto’s own: how many opportunities in the Bay, by category; how many apprenticeships against the metro’s share of the 10,000; what the payment records show; and what share of procurement reaches women-, youth- and disability-owned enterprises.
The first LED one-stop desk a new council stands up, and the first payment-run it publishes, will say more about Action Two than any launch speech. This publication will report both.
Sources and further reading
This explainer is based on the ANC’s 2026 Local Government Elections Manifesto, Masakhe: Let Us Build, Action Two (pages 25 to 30) and its enterprise and skills chapters (pages 56 to 60), 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: The ANC’s 8% Municipal Maintenance Promise
- The People’s Register: What Masakhe’s First 100 Days Will Look Like in Your Ward
Download the Masakhe manifesto
Read the ANC’s 2026 Local Government Elections Manifesto in full, 65 pages as launched at Riverside Park in Diepsloot on 23 August 2026. Every commitment, every target, every date.