OPINION | The views expressed are those of Lukhanyo Frank Mbiza. This contribution presents the author’s views on the ANC’s mayoral selection process.
Two roads to the mayoral office
The African National Congress has always described itself as a movement that governs itself from the bottom up. Its branches are meant to be the foundation on which every leadership choice rests, from ward councillors to the President of the Republic. That is why the sight of two very different roads to the same destination, the office of mayor, sitting side by side in the 2026 selection process should trouble anyone who cares about the ANC's internal discipline and its founding character.
On one road, an ordinary ANC member must be identified by a branch, endorsed through structures, screened, interviewed and recommended before their name is even considered. On the other, a person, member or not, may simply submit their own name through the party's public nomination portal and be treated, on paper, as equal to someone who carried the confidence of an entire branch or region. The ANC's own statement on this public stream says the invitation is genuinely open, and that any South African, whether or not they belong to the movement, may place their own name forward for consideration alongside those nominated by structures.
What the guidelines actually say
The ANC's Local Government Elections 2026 selection rules and guidelines, approved by the National Executive Committee in November 2025, are explicit that branch participation is not optional. The document states that the NEC regards branch involvement in candidate selection as a test of the ANC's own existence and capacity in every region, province and at national level. That is a strong claim. It means a branch that is bypassed is not a minor administrative inconvenience; by the party's own logic, it is a sign that the ANC's organisational life in that ward or region is failing.
Yet the same cycle introduced what the party calls its Centralised Mayoral Selection Programme, under which the National Executive Committee vested in the National Officials the authority to appoint mayoral candidates for metros and designated strategic municipalities directly. Branch nominations, League nominations and Alliance nominations still feed into the process, but they now sit in the same intake as names from the public and from self-nominees, before National Officials make the final call. A structure that spent months holding meetings, canvassing residents and building consensus around a comrade can, in the end, find that comrade weighed no differently than someone who typed their own name into a web form.
A departure from founding principle
This matters because the ANC did not invent itself as a party of individual ambition. Its foundational commitments, going back to the Freedom Charter's declaration that the people shall govern, and carried into the ANC Constitution's insistence on collective leadership, accountability of leaders to structures, and decision-making that flows from branches upward, were built precisely to prevent a situation where influence, money or self-promotion could substitute for the trust of an organised collective. Democratic centralism, as the ANC has long practised it, was never meant to mean centralism without the democratic input of the branch that gave it legitimacy in the first place. When self-nomination is placed on equal footing with branch endorsement, the branch stops being the foundation and becomes just one voice among many, including voices that never built anything within the movement at all.
The consequences of this are not theoretical. Reports from Buffalo City, where branch members have taken legal steps against the regional leadership over alleged interference in candidate selection, and from the Moses Mabhida region, where an affiliate accused the ANC of arrogantly sidelining branch-nominated candidates from interviews, show that comrades are already reading this centralisation as factional manipulation rather than a fair search for the best candidate. In Madibeng, a branch-nominated ward councillor who was rejected has been publicly courted to stand instead for the South African Communist Party, with residents openly discussing the SACP option on branch WhatsApp groups. These are not isolated grumbles. They are the early tremors of exactly the kind of internal defiance that a movement built on branch discipline should fear most.
Feeding a split the ANC can least afford
The timing could hardly be worse for a departure from branch-based legitimacy. The SACP has, for the first time since 1994, chosen to contest these local elections independently of the ANC rather than campaign under its banner. Every comrade who feels their branch's judgment was overridden by a centrally imposed or self-appointed candidate is a potential recruit for that independent campaign, and every quiet vote cast for the SACP out of frustration is a vote the ANC cannot easily win back. A movement that prides itself on unity in action after robust internal debate cannot afford a selection method that looks, to its own foot soldiers, like the sidelining of exactly the people it asks to knock on doors, organise branches and carry the campaign on their backs.
The way back
None of this is an argument against opening the ANC to fresh, capable people, including those outside its ranks. It is an argument for sequencing and honesty about hierarchy. If the party genuinely believes, as its own guidelines state, that branch participation is the litmus test of its own health, then branch-endorsed candidates cannot be run through the same undifferentiated portal as self-nominees and simply left to the discretion of National Officials at the end. The Freedom Charter's promise that the people shall govern was written for the branch member who mobilises a ward, not only for the individual confident enough to nominate themselves. Restoring that hierarchy, publicly and procedurally, is the surest way to close the cracks before they widen into a permanent defection of ANC voters to the SACP and to the deeper cynicism already visible in Buffalo City, Moses Mabhida and Madibeng.