The battle between the ANC and the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) over candidate nominations has become a contest of competing versions of the truth.
The ANC says that a technical glitch in the IEC’s system prevented the submission of some councillor candidate lists for the November local government elections before the 5pm deadline last Friday. The party says the names were captured, but not submitted.
The IEC, however, maintains that its system was operational and that the candidates were never formally submitted. The coming week is crucial in terms of the path forward as the IEC is set to publish the final candidate list on September 16.
Candidates were reportedly missing from the ANC’s lists in Mangaung in the Free State, uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal and at least three municipalities in the Eastern Cape.
The IEC said candidates from other parties were also affected, but none of the other parties had publicly raised a dispute on the matter. At the heart of the issue is the distinction between names being captured and being submitted.
The IEC said 2,274 potential candidates from 45 parties had been captured on its Online Candidate Nomination System by the deadline but had not been formally submitted. They included 480 proportional-representation candidates and 1,794 ward councillor candidates.
In other words, appearing on the system did not necessarily mean that a candidate had been formally nominated.
My Vote Counts advocacy lead Noxolo Mfocwa this week said the answers would be found in the system logs, timestamps and transaction records.
The evidence could show whether parties had met the legal requirements for submission before 5pm, or whether an IEC technical or administrative failure had prevented a valid submission from being recorded, she said.
But Mfocwa stressed that an available system did not necessarily mean that every function had worked successfully, and an incomplete nomination did not, by itself, prove that a technical failure had occurred.
Political analyst Dr Susan Booysen said the matter appeared “more like an ANC problem than an IEC problem”.
She said the party had been struggling with organisational issues for some time, including convening conferences, announcing mayors, appointing councillors and dealing with underperforming incumbents.
The candidate-list crisis, she said, had to be viewed against that background.
The ANC was simply “not as well organised, as streamlined, as focused” as it had once been, Booysen said.
That raises a bigger question than what happened on the IEC’s system: whether the latest crisis has exposed an organisational weakness inside the ANC that the party is now trying to address through a dispute with the IEC.
In May, Makhanda High Court in the Eastern Cape struck down the ANC’s newly formed Provincial Task Team, ruling that the way its members had been appointed was unlawful. The judgment set off deep party divisions, prompting suspensions of members tied to the court case and sparking chaos over the candidate lists.
If the ANC takes the Electoral Court route, it would not be the first time the IEC’s technology system is brought into question.
In June, the Electoral Court in Johannesburg reserved judgment in a case brought by the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, which argued that glitches in the IEC’s results leaderboard system pointed to manipulation and vote-rigging when the dashboard went offline during the 2024 election, a claim the IEC dismissed as unsubstantiated.
The stakes are also high for the IEC, Booysen said.
“The IEC is also in that situation of hyper-visibility and hyper-accountability. So they are not going to bend the rules. If the ANC wants to persist and thinks it has a case, then it will probably have to go to the Electoral Court,” Booysen said.
Political analyst and lawyer Dr Bhasela Yalezo concurred that there appeared to be a pattern of organisational failures that had repeatedly put the ANC on the back foot.
The difference this time, he said, was that the ANC may have weakened itself further by turning an internal problem into a public dispute with the IEC.
For the ANC, the legal route is unlikely to be easy.
Yalezo said the courts had consistently treated electoral deadlines seriously.
The party would need compelling evidence that the IEC itself was responsible for the failure before it could expect a court to relax the deadline.
Without that evidence, Yalezo said, the ANC’s prospects of persuading a court to intervene were slim.
Even if the party succeeds in bringing the matter before the Electoral Court, he said, it cannot escape the bigger problem exposed by the episode.
The ANC, he argued, needs to take responsibility for its own organisational failures rather than continually looking elsewhere for the cause.
Vincent Maake of the Ground Work Collective, which is training election observers, said there was a great deal at stake for the IEC.
He said observers had already encountered disinformation and conflicting views about the commission during their work on the ground.
Maake emphasised the verification of sources, saying: “It’s important for people to keep tabs on what’s happening, but also to be mindful of what they are consuming about party politics.”
The ANC’s national executive committee is expected to meet this week to decide the way forward, with its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, stating on Friday that the party has several options open to it, including continued engagement with the IEC, taking the matter to the Electoral Court or using the National Political Liaison Committee to seek a resolution.
wendy.jdc@nationalmg.co.za