The ANC has finally lived up to its promise to announce its mayoral candidates for the major cities and towns. For years it has steadfastly refused to make the names of its candidates public before elections, arguing that voters are interested in the party and its policies - and not who it is going to make mayor or premier.This has meant that voters have often gone to the polls, at local and provincial level, without full information about the calibre of the people who will lead the governments they are voting for.Yet the quality of those who occupy leadership positions is as important as the policies they seek to implement.Many underperforming municipalities fail to deliver services to their residents because they are led by people who simply lack the skills to lead them and are in those positions merely because they happened to be preferred by those in power in their party.There is no doubt that the relative success and stability of the Johannesburg and Cape Town metro councils have more to do with the leadership qualities of mayors Parks Tau and Patricia de Lille, respectively, and less to do with which political party they come from.The jury is still out on whether Danny Jordaan' s arrival in the hotly contested Nelson Mandela Bay metro will help the ANC keep its majority on August 3, but it is clear that as mayor he has greatly improved the city's performance on the service delivery front.Voters, therefore, have every right to scrutinise the track record and the ability of those who seek to lead their local government structures after the elections.Making the names of mayoral candidates public also means that individuals can be held directly responsible, once in office, for keeping the promises they make while campaigning.With opposition parties such as the DA and the EFF increasingly making inroads into previously impenetrable ANC strongholds, the party appears to be waking up to the reality that it can no longer rely on its brand and history to win elections.It has to put forward credible candidates to win the hearts and minds of increasingly sceptical voters.This can only be good for our democracy and governance.However, the system is not yet perfect.That voters now know who the candidates for mayor are does not mean that they can directly vote those candidates in or out of office. Technically, the mayor will still be elected by a majority of elected councillors in a council meeting.This means that a political party can still "recall" a popular mayor from office even when the majority of residents in that city believes that he or she is doing a great job.In many of the cities and towns where mayors have been changed several times within one term, there have been no real reason, in terms of service deliver, for doing so. Politics, especially internal party politics that had nothing to do with the majority of residents, had led to their removal.If we are to have local government that is more stable, and therefore successful, parties need to go beyond just announcing the names of their mayoral candidates. They need to change the electoral system to ensure that mayors are directly voted into office by the electorate and can only be removed by voters through fresh polls...