The party is establishing a task team led by Minister Parks Tau, a former mayor of Johannesburg, to tackle service delivery issues. (Dwayne Senior/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The ANC has set up a special task team to deal with service delivery problems in local government, which it says contributed to its poor performance in the 29 May national and provincial elections.
The team will be led by Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Parks Tau, who was previously the deputy minister of cooperative governance and Johannesburg’s mayor (2011-16)
The problems are causing instability in metros, ANC acting national spokesperson Zuko Godlimpi told reporters on Monday, on the sidelines of the party’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting in Ekurhuleni.
“South Africans are no longer interested in the distinction between the different spheres of government. They are making the moral argument that it’s one state and one government, the problems must be attended to by everybody,” he said.
“That’s why the president [Cyril Ramaphosa] said yesterday that the ANC is now going to focus very seriously on the local government sphere, starting with Johannesburg.”
The meeting comes in the wake of the party’s electoral decline this year, with its share of the vote falling below 50% for the first time since 1994. The loss of its parliamentary majority resulted in the ANC forming a government of national unity.
Godlimpi said NEC members would be sent to struggling municipalities that have been hit by instability, adding: “There will be instances where an NEC member is deployed, there will be instances where a regional or provincial leader is deployed. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.”
The ANC faced its steepest decline in metros, particularly in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay, which have been plagued by prolonged governance instability.
Godlimpi said the party was discussing concrete plans to turn its electoral fortunes around ahead of the 2026 local government elections. He said it would refer back to the accountability framework agreed upon last year, which called on secretary general Fikile Mbalula to run performance reviews of all NEC members on a continuous basis.
“We must be in a position to say, what are the tasks for the first four weeks? What are the tasks for the next eight and what assessments [are] there so that we can then get those reports in real time across, including to understand what the constraints are?” Godlimpi said.
“If there’s the slowness in progress, we can’t be told after a year or two years that ‘no, we couldn’t deliver water there because these are the problems we face’. We must get that understanding in a short period of time so that we can trigger a support measure from the higher spheres of government.”
It could no longer be “business as usual” for the party. “What has changed is that the ANC lost [support]. You can no longer be lacklustre when you’ve lost your majority. There are things that the ANC has known are problematic but could have easily been complacent about how we respond to it. The ANC can no longer afford complacency.
“The urgency of the situation arises out of the objective reality that the ANC is losing elections. So, we have no choice but to move with speed and do things better.”
Godlimpi said the party would focus its attention on the City of Johannesburg where the “political situation has become unsustainable” and “something has to give”.
The metro has become a political battleground, with parties demanding the resignation of mayor Kabelo Gwamanda following the ANC’s agreement with ActionSA after its relationship with the Economic Freedom Fighters soured. Since local government elections in 2021, the city has seen some five mayors come and go.
Godlimpi said the poor delivery of services was deepening inequality that could result in social instability and cause a significant number of citizens to stop voting.
“If we don’t get it to work, the capability of the entire democratic order is at stake. It’s the eligible people who should be voting; some of whom didn’t even register, while others do register but don’t show up at the polls. That number is larger than any political party within the system,” he said.