Parties scramble to meet IEC’s candidate deadline for November 4 vote

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula says his party met the crucial Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) deadline for parties to submit their lists of councillor candidates for the local government elections by 5pm on Friday.

This follows a scare that the ANC would not be able to meet the August 28 deadline as party leaders disagreed on the composition of its municipal councillor candidate lists during several meetings of the national executive committee (NEC) that ran late into the night this week.

Some ANC structures in the Eastern Cape had also threatened to mount a legal challenge over the composition of the list of candidates nominated to serve in the Buffalo City metro should the ANC retain it in the elections.

There were also concerns that the Eastern Cape would not have enough time to finalise its candidate lists, as its provincial executive committee was only reinstated on August 19 following its disbandment in May, which has since been overturned by the high court.

“It appears as if a substantial majority of registered parties have submitted candidates.” — IEC chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo

Mbalula told the Sunday Times on Saturday that the ANC had met the deadline to submit the lists of candidates to contest all 257 municipalities, with the required IEC deposit of more than R730,000 already paid.

In terms of electoral law, parties are required to pay a deposit of R4,700 for every metro it contests, a further R2,800 for a local municipality and another R1,800 for district municipalities.

Mbalula dismissed claims that the ANC had missed the IEC deadline, especially in Eastern Cape municipalities. “No, it’s not true. We submitted all our candidates and paid in advance,” he said.

During the previous local government elections in 2021, the ANC failed to submit candidate lists in at least 20 municipalities and 598 wards countrywide within the stipulated timeframe. But following a court challenge by the DA, they were thrown a lifeline by the Constitutional Court after it upheld the IEC’s decision to reset the 2021 electoral deadline due to the pandemic lockdown at the time.

By law, a party that misses the deadline to submit a list of proportional representation and ward candidates in a municipality it intends to contest is automatically barred from entering the electoral race. The IEC said ahead of this year’s Friday deadline that it was not going to grant a deadline extension.

By the close of business on Friday, a total of 519 out of the more than 700 registered parties had complied with the deadline.

IEC chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo told the Sunday Times that a majority of the registered political parties met the deadline to submit their councillor candidate lists.

“It appears as if a substantial majority of registered parties have submitted candidates. We are now in the process of verifying each party and all its nominated candidates against the relevant legal criteria, and we will be in a position to give preliminary figures by the middle of next week,” Mamabolo said.

The IEC will this weekend verify whether the candidates were properly registered before finalising the lists after considering whether “the candidate is registered, has the deposit been paid, is it registered in the right municipality, and so on. Those are the things we are going to be looking at.”

DA federal council chair and campaign manager Ashor Sarupen said his party had met the IEC deadline by 9am on Friday.

He said they had combed through more than 6,500 applications from candidates during their selection process. “Our candidates come from a broad array of backgrounds; we are talking about community organisations, NGOs, local business and professionals. We had a record number of applications.”

The MK Party and the EFF also met the deadline, with MK Party insiders saying at least 90% of its lists had been submitted by Wednesday.

Areas of concern for the MK Party, according to a party source, were mostly in some rural parts of the Eastern Cape and the Northern Cape.

“Yes, we met the deadline; two days before the deadline over 90% was submitted already,” the source said. “It was only in the Northern Cape and some parts of the Eastern Cape where we were struggling to find people, but those things have been resolved. There are only around 300 VDs [voting districts] that we are not contesting, but mostly in the deep rural areas in the Northern Cape.

“We even paid the money upfront for this. This thing was properly planned.”

The EFF said it had submitted a list of almost 4,500 councillor candidates in most of the municipalities.

“The EFF can confirm that it has met this critical electoral deadline and has submitted its candidates to contest all wards across the country,” the party said.

“The organisation has captured a total of 4,485 candidates with the IEC, representing a strong national footprint across all nine provinces. This includes 1,398 youth candidates between the ages of 18 and 35 and 1,731 candidates being women.”