LUCKY MATHEBULA | Pussyfooting ANC’s mayoral choices will be a test of political renewal

The much-anticipated announcement of the ANC’s mayoral candidates failed to meet the moment. Instead of presenting clear choices, the party unveiled shortlists and deferred final decisions. That hesitation matters. For all its electoral decline and accumulated failures of accountability, the ANC remains a benchmark against which South Africa measures political leadership. The standard it sets, whether elevated or diminished, continues to shape the wider political field.

The movement that helped imagine a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, united and prosperous society inherited an exacting leadership tradition. The generation that negotiated the constitutional settlement did more than occupy office: it articulated a conception of public power anchored in dignity, equality and democratic responsibility. Those who inherit that tradition cannot treat leadership as a reward for organisational loyalty. They carry a higher burden, to demonstrate that political authority is a form of public trusteeship.

The ANC’s indecision therefore reveals more than a difficult personnel choice. It exposes the depth of fragmentation within its ranks and the extent to which factional vetoes have displaced institutional judgment.

A party that cannot choose its own public face risks appearing incapable of choosing a governing direction. In politics, postponement is rarely neutral: it redistributes power to organised minorities, entrenched interests and those most willing to threaten rupture.

This is especially consequential in South Africa’s emerging coalition order. Unlike the periods of sustained one-party dominance associated with the National Party after 1948 and the ANC after 1994, political authority is now increasingly dispersed among parties, factions, civic formations and independent actors. Each possesses some capacity to shape outcomes, but few possess enough power to determine them alone.

Leadership in this environment must negotiate without surrendering principle, build coalitions without normalising patronage and govern through institutions rather than personality.

A movement that governs by appeasing threatened defections eventually loses the ability to govern itself.

The mayoral question is consequently not a ceremonial one. Municipalities are where constitutional promises acquire, or fail to acquire, material form. Water, sanitation, electricity, roads, refuse removal, spatial planning and local economic development are not secondary administrative concerns; they are the everyday substance of citizenship.

A mayoral candidate must therefore be judged not only by factional acceptability or electoral appeal, but by administrative competence, ethical credibility, coalition-building capacity and a demonstrable understanding of the developmental state.

The fear that disappointed aspirants may contest as independents only deepens the diagnosis. If the possibility of defection can paralyse a national leadership, internal discipline has already been weakened by entitlement. Political commitment cannot be reduced to the expectation of deployment. The real test of an ANC cadre is whether service to the organisation and society continues when no office is offered.

The Johannesburg shortlist crystallises the dilemma. Dada Morero represents continuity and incumbency; Loyiso Masuku embodies the authority of the recently elected regional leadership and the possibility of generational renewal; Rev Frank Chikane invokes ethical gravitas and the seriousness of organisational renewal.

Each option carries political costs. Yet leadership is not about avoiding risk. It is about making principled choices under uncertainty and accepting responsibility for their consequences.

To choose Morero would be to defend continuity and require an account of its results. To choose Masuku would be to align party office with the mayoral mandate while testing whether regional legitimacy can be converted into metropolitan governance. To choose Chikane would signal that renewal and integrity are not merely rhetorical instruments but governing criteria. None of these choices is costless; all are more defensible than indecision.

The same principle applies in other cities. The ANC’s National Executive Committee must distinguish between organisational popularity and governing capability. It must ask who can stabilise administrations, command professional bureaucracies, secure credible coalition agreements and restore public trust.

Candidate selection should not reproduce the assumption that a provincial or regional chairperson is automatically entitled to become premier or mayor. That logic converts political organisation into a ladder to state office and hollows out the distinction between party mandate and public duty.

South African political history offers ample warning. Breakaway parties and independent candidacies have often been propelled by leaders who lost internal contests and then recast personal exclusion as ideological rupture.

The formation of COPE remains instructive because an internal struggle over leadership and organisational direction translated into a lasting electoral loss for the ANC. But the answer cannot be to reward every threat of departure. A movement that governs by appeasing threatened defections eventually loses the ability to govern itself.

Political office must be governed by an institutional principle: party responsibility and state authority are related but not identical. Deployment should serve the constitutional requirements of the state, not the organisation’s ambitions. When office becomes an entitlement, public institutions are subordinated to internal succession battles, and citizens become spectators to contests over patronage.

The ANC has long prided itself on its capacity for analysis. Yet analysis that never matures into decision becomes a sophisticated form of evasion. The relevant questions are now stark. Which candidate can govern without being captured by a faction? Who can negotiate coalition agreements that are transparent, programmatic and enforceable? Who can defend administrative professionalism against political interference? Who can persuade citizens that municipal government is capable of competence rather than permanent crisis?

The ANC is unlikely to secure outright majorities in several contested municipalities. That probability should sharpen, not weaken, its leadership choices. In a coalition era, the mayor must be more than the victor of an internal contest. The office requires a constitutional democrat, an institutional strategist and a credible steward of public resources. The successful candidate must be able to convert fragmented mandates into a coherent programme of government.

The mayoral decision will therefore say more about the ANC than the names eventually announced. It will reveal whether renewal is an organising principle or a slogan; whether competence outranks factional convenience; and whether the movement still understands leadership as service rather than entitlement. South Africa does not need candidates selected merely to preserve internal peace. It needs mayors capable of restoring the authority of democratic local government.

The verdict is unavoidable: if the ANC cannot choose leaders who place competence, integrity and the public good above factional appeasement, then its claim to political renewal is no longer credible; it is merely the rhetoric of an organisation unwilling to reform itself.