My mother is 80-something, frail, and unapologetically ANC. She is not a strategist or a pollster. She is a woman whose entire adult life was shaped by the violence of being told her name was not her own.
When she was a job-seeker in Pretoria, apartheid authorities renamed her Grace because none of them cared to pronounce Nokwanda, her given name that was on her dompas. Some people still call her Grace.
She once had an altercation with a young police officer in the 1980s for staring too long at the Union Buildings. She remembers the anger in her chest when a young white man shouted “Hey!” at her. A sound she can probably still hear. She remembers the year my father was arrested without trial for his work as a trade unionist and his political views.
For her generation, Nelson Mandela became the ANC and the ANC became Mandela. It promised a life of dignity. That promise was the difference between a social grant that treated you like a human being and one that treated you like a nuisance under the National Party. It was the ANC bringing houses, water and electricity to people who had never known them.
My mother’s generation did not vote for the ANC despite its flaws. They voted because the alternative was the world that called them Grace.
I am 42. I remember the RDP, Asgisa and now the NDP. I became a taxpayer during a decline that was not yet obvious in the early 2000s.
Three decades into democracy, we are asking whether we should read the ANC its burial rites. Honestly, the party is making it easy.
The candidate list chaos is not a technical glitch. It is a symptom. The ANC failed to submit 181 councillor candidates for six municipalities before the IEC’s 5pm deadline on 28 August. Secretary-general Fikile Mbalula admitted that some branch-submitted lists contained inaccurate and unverified identity numbers. The Electoral Court dismissed the party’s application, and the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has been unambiguous: the exclusion is a result of the ANC’s failure.
The party is in the Constitutional Court, arguing that it uploaded the names but did not press the final submit button. This is the governing party of Mandela reduced to litigating the meaning of a button.
The ANC’s dysfunction is not new. Anyone who has read Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat, about corruption in Kenya, could replace the characters with ANC politicians and the book would still make sense.
The numbers tell a story the party refuses to hear. Ipsos polling predicts the ANC could drop to 29% in Buffalo City, a 30-percentage-point collapse from its 2021 performance. Nationally, the party sits at 31%, with the DA at 25%, the MK Party at 14% and the EFF at 11%.
Nearly half of South Africans say no political party represents their views. Two-thirds of adults do not vote in local government elections. The IEC’s own research points to “disillusionment with the lack of tangible democratic dividends”.
Telling Gen Z that ANC formations took care of my family when my father was incarcerated without trial in the 1980s will not land. They have no living memory of apartheid.
But they live its legacy. The poverty they did not choose, the reliance on social grants, the struggle for university funding, the youth unemployment that swallows their peers. Their abstention is a rational response to a party that has been the worst teller of its own success stories.
And yet, I want to defend my mother’s generation because they were choosing a world that had given them little. They were not naive. They knew the ANC was a liberation movement, not a government-in-waiting. They knew it would have to evolve. They believed it could. That belief was an act of faith in the possibility that the country that had called them by the wrong name might one day call them citizens.
The tragedy is not that my mother’s generation kept the ANC in power. The tragedy is that the ANC never learnt to deserve them. It remained a liberation movement, preoccupied with internal battles, unable to become a political party. It told itself stories about its history while the present fell apart. It asked for loyalty while offering less and less in return.
My mother will probably vote ANC again. She is not blind to the candidate list chaos, the corruption or the unemployment. But she also remembers the year my father was taken and the ANC that stood with her when no one else did. She remembers the promise of dignity, even if that promise has been broken.
I am not asking anyone to forgive the ANC. I am asking that we understand the generation that sustained it. They were people who chose the face of a history that had given them no good options. They deserve better than to watch their faith become a punchline. They deserve a party that remembers what it promised.
If the ANC cannot be that party, then perhaps it is time to let it go, not with anger but with the recognition that some things, like my mother’s name, were never meant to be taken from us in the first place. Nokwanda. Her name is Nokwanda.
Matuba Mahlatjie is a journalist and strategic communications specialist.