ANC’s 2026 Local-Election Preparations Expose Candidate Failures

What changed

South Africa’s 2026 local-election preparations are exposing serious strain inside the ANC while campaigns increasingly chase attention online. The party failed to register 181 councillor candidates nationally; in the Eastern Cape, its list reportedly arrived at national headquarters only minutes before the IEC deadline. It has also introduced a matric pledge requiring candidates without the qualification to obtain it within 12 months of taking office or lose their seats.

Why it matters

This is more than a messy campaign season. It raises a basic question about whether parties can put capable people into local government before asking voters to trust them with cities and towns. More than 300 KwaZulu-Natal councillors were reported to be functionally illiterate, which helps explain why the ANC is tying office to a deadline for completing matric.

The campaign itself is becoming a contest in visibility. Helen Zille’s viral boat trip through potholes, celebrity mayoral bids and possible influencer outreach all point toward politics designed for the feed. Ready D has already withdrawn from the Cape Town mayoral race, while Ntsiki Mazwai and SkeemGP remain among the celebrity figures linked to mayoral contests.

That strategy can make a candidate impossible to ignore. It cannot, by itself, show whether they can run a municipality. As journalist Caryn Dolley put it, social media can become “vanity politics”; student Nonhlanhla Sonto Mashabana asked whether Zille’s online claims were actually happening in real life. Whether digital attention becomes votes or effective government remains uncertain.

The sharper warning came from retired Constitutional Court Justice Edwin Cameron, after Cape Town’s rainbow pedestrian crossing was vandalised twice in hours. He said he wanted to attend next year’s Pan-African Family Values conference in Cape Town, which has been criticised for anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-women’s-rights politics, to argue that families like his belong in the conversation too. That is the choice facing this election: politics as performance, or politics that can still deal with the people standing in front of it.