By Nco Dube | 10 September 2026

The African National Congress’ (ANC) candidate-list fiasco is not a minor administrative mishap. It is a miniature of how the party has governed South Africa: delay what can be done early, ignore warnings, allow factional interests to overwhelm basic administration, manufacture a crisis at the deadline, blame the system and then search for an institution capable of rescuing the organisation from itself.

The immediate dispute concerns 181 ANC candidates across six municipalities: Port St Johns, Ngquza Hill, Walter Sisulu and Sundays River Valley in the Eastern Cape, uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal and Mangaung in the Free State. In Port St Johns and Ngquza Hill, the ANC reportedly failed to submit any candidates at all. The party says the candidates’ information and supporting documents had been uploaded onto the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s (IEC) online system before the 5pm deadline on 28 August, but technical difficulties prevented its administrators from completing the final step by clicking “submit as final”. The IEC has rejected the suggestion that its system malfunctioned.

The ANC has now approached the Electoral Court, arguing that information already received and stored by the IEC’s system should legally be regarded as submitted, even without final confirmation. Its case is not entirely frivolous. It relies partly on the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and contends that electronic submission should occur when a complete data message enters the designated system and becomes capable of being retrieved. It also says any relief should apply equally to other affected parties, not only the ANC.

The court must decide that legal question on its merits. If there is credible evidence that a systemic failure prejudiced several parties, fairness may require an appropriate remedy. Access to the courts is not itself an abuse, and losing candidates should not be sacrificed merely to satisfy the public appetite for ANC humiliation.

But a legal argument cannot wash away the political and ethical failure that carried the party to the courtroom.

The ANC successfully completed the final submission process in the overwhelming majority of municipalities. This weakens the claim that it could not understand the distinction between capturing information and submitting it. The system deliberately allows parties to load and amend provisional information before making a final submission. Treating every captured draft as final could leave parties saddled with candidates they had not yet approved. The ANC understood this distinction everywhere else. It is asking the court to soften it only where its own administrators ran out of time.

More damagingly, this was not an unforeseeable emergency. Former president Kgalema Motlanthe’s electoral committee reportedly advised the ANC more than a year ago to begin its candidate-selection process much earlier. The committee proposed beginning the councillor list process in February, allowing approximately six months to resolve disputes and verify submissions. The ANC rejected that timetable, partly because it feared that announcing candidates early would prolong internal fighting over positions. It began substantially later and was still changing lists hours before the IEC deadline.

The deadline did not ambush the ANC. The party walked towards it slowly, ignored the warnings along the road and then acted surprised when the gate closed.

That is not a technical glitch. It is an organisational culture.

This is also not the first time. In 2021, the ANC failed to submit candidates in 93 municipalities before the original deadline. It was eventually saved when the IEC issued a revised election timetable after the Constitutional Court rejected the Commission’s attempt to postpone the elections until 2022. The IEC reopened both voter registration and candidate nominations. The Constitutional Court later dismissed the DA’s application to set aside that reopening.

Politically, the ANC escaped the consequences of its own failure. Five years later, the same organisation has once again arrived at the deadline carrying incomplete work and expecting the constitutional machinery to absorb the impact.

An institution that learns nothing from rescue eventually mistakes rescue for entitlement.

The response of the ANC leadership exposes the deeper crisis. President Cyril Ramaphosa has dismissed the problem as a “little hiccup” affecting only about three percent of the party’s candidates. Secretary-general Fikile Mbalula at whom many are apportioning the blame, has argued that the failure cannot be attributed to one person. This is the familiar grammar of ANC accountability: minimise the damage, collectivise responsibility and ensure that nobody identifiable carries the consequences. Responsibility is spread so widely that it disappears.

Three percent sounds small when spoken from a campaign platform. It does not feel small to voters in municipalities where the governing party may disappear from particular ballots. It is not small to ANC members who participated in candidate-selection processes only to discover that their own organisation could not complete the final administrative step. Nor is it small in Mangaung, a metropolitan municipality whose governance failures have already required national intervention.

For more than three decades, South Africans have watched this method migrate from Luthuli House into the state. Maintenance is postponed until infrastructure collapses. Municipal accounts are neglected until electricity or water services face disconnection. Cadres are deployed without the necessary competence, then protected until institutions buckle beneath them. Deadlines are ignored, warnings are buried and preventable failures are renamed crises. Once the damage becomes unavoidable, a task team is appointed, a court application is filed or another public institution is expected to become the shock absorber for political failure.

The problem is not that ANC leaders consciously wake up each morning determined to destroy the state. The truth is more ordinary and, in some ways, more damning. Too often, they behave as though consequences can always be negotiated later. Power has insulated the organisation from the discipline that governs everyone else. Rules are treated as provisional when they become inconvenient. Accountability is praised from podiums but resisted wherever it acquires a name, a face and a consequence.

This attitude has damaged public trust far beyond the ANC itself. Whenever an institution accommodates the governing party, even for legally defensible reasons, citizens suspect political favour. The 2021 reopening may have been lawful and available to everyone, yet it inevitably created the impression that the rules had shifted just when the ANC needed them to shift. That perception was intensified by the ANC’s long habit of treating the party and the state as adjoining rooms in the same house, separated by a door that is opened whenever convenient.

This is why the IEC must apply the law consistently and explain its decisions transparently. It must neither punish the ANC to advertise its independence nor rescue it because of its political weight. If uploading without final submission did not qualify for any other party, it cannot suddenly qualify because the ANC failed in electorally important municipalities. If a genuine system-wide malfunction is proved, any remedy must rest on an objective principle available to every affected contestant.

The ANC is entitled to its day in court. It is not entitled to hide from political accountability behind the robes of the judges. Whether it wins or loses, it should explain why Motlanthe’s warning was ignored, who authorised the compressed timetable, why submissions were left until the final minutes and what consequences will follow.

A party asking voters to entrust it with municipalities should first demonstrate that it can administer its own candidate lists. The inability to click a final button is not the country’s greatest crisis. The belief that someone else must always carry the cost of ANC failure may well be.