By Akani Nkuna
The ANC Local Government Intervention Task Team (LGITT) chairperson, Stella Ndabeni, has called on South Africans to give the party another opportunity to lead at municipal level, saying it has reviewed its policies, undergone renewal and learnt from previous governance failures.
“Yes, we acknowledge fully that we have failed in certain instances, and this is why we are appealing to South Africans to say, give us another time to improve where we have not done well. Give us another time to fix the mistakes that we have made,” she said.
Ndabeni was speaking during a media briefing at Chief Albert Luthuli House in Johannesburg on Wednesday.
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She said the ANC had taken cognisance of public dissatisfaction with the party, as reflected in its declining electoral support since the 2021 local government elections and the May 2024 general elections.
The ANC has undertaken to convene a series of manifesto review media briefings ahead of the launch of its 2026 Local Government Elections (LGE) Manifesto in Riverside, Johannesburg, on 22 August.
The party said the briefings would provide honest and evidence-based assessments of its 2021 LGE Manifesto and offer an opportunity to account for its governance record.
The engagements are also intended to reflect critically on the party’s performance and demonstrate how lessons from implementing its policies at local government level continue to shape its approach.
“That is why we start by acknowledging that we are not starting from scratch. We have learned; we have seen; therefore in 2026, this is why we are saying, in our own document, that we are committing to improve.
“We are not starting afresh on accountability. We are strengthening mechanisms because we have identified our weaknesses,” Ndabeni said.
She also said municipal performance reviews should go beyond clean audit outcomes and assess the impact of service delivery.
Ndabeni said municipalities needed to address historical inequalities while maintaining roads, managing assets and meeting compliance requirements.
“Financial governance and service performance and transformation must therefore be considered together. The real objective is an ethical municipality that plans honestly, spends lawfully, maintains its assets, collects revenue fairly and delivers services reliably,” she said.
LGITT deputy chairperson Dickson Masemola said the rise of coalition governments, particularly after the 2016 local government elections, had created difficulties for municipalities.
He attributed some of the challenges to the ANC no longer having a monopoly at local government level, resulting in political fragmentation and competing policy approaches.
Masemola said claims that weakening the ANC and introducing coalition governments would improve service delivery had proven incorrect.
He said divergent ideological positions represented in several coalition-led municipalities had negatively affected governance and financial administration.
“The leadership characterised by coalition dynamics in these big cities and elsewhere, unavoidably, has basically brought all these what we are going through now, which has become permanent systemic problems, which were not there before,” Masemola said.
He said the problems had emerged largely because governance systems were unable to effectively manage the jurisdictions under coalition arrangements.
