Grass-roots disgruntlement over Luthuli House’s perceived manipulation of candidate lists for the local elections appears to have resulted in a fairly substantial increase in the number of independent candidates.
Final candidate lists released by the Independent Electoral Commission this week show that the number of independents has risen from 663 in 2006 to 748, a 13% increase.
However, the significance should not be overstated. According to the IEC there are 53 596 candidates in total, an increase of 8 000 since 2006 and 23 000 since 2000, largely because of the redemarcation of municipalities.
This year, more than 10 000 are standing in KwaZulu-Natal and 9 000 in Gauteng. A total of 9 403 candidates are standing for the ANC and 7 117 for the Democratic Alliance.
The increased number of independent candidates is a sign of a healthy democracy, said Idasa political analyst, Justin Sylvester, ascribing the growth to internal crises in the ANC, prompting a grassroots-driven list process.
“This year, because of the ANC’s own admission regarding a crisis in its local-government structures, it had a very democratic process, with community participation at branch level.”
But the list process is a complicated one, he said. “Branches nominate candidates for the list, which then gets sent to provincial structures and finally to Luthuli House. “At every stage, it is engineered according to gender, region and other factors. By the time the final list is released, many candidates have been left off.” Because of public participation, many sidelined candidates have community support and believe that they can “go it alone”.
“A lot of people who didn’t make it onto the lists complained to the communities,” Sylvester said. “They said to the party, ‘to hell with you guys, we can do this by ourselves’.”
The number who believed they could stand in elections without party support was a testament to “the quality of democracy practised by parties”, Sylvester argued.
The commission’s chief electoral officer, Pansy Tlakula, said that “the number of political parties and candidates who indicated their participation, compared to previous municipal elections in 2006 and 2000, demonstrates that this election has generated a lot of interest and is important to our communities.”