The smouldering contestations around the ANC’s provinces as 2026 elections loom

On Tuesday, ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula confirmed that the national executive committee (NEC) will finally take a formal decision about the leaderships of its KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces in December.

This means that a final decision on this question will only be taken a full seven months after it became clear that the leaders of the ANC in these provinces had lost huge swathes of support, with the party dropping to 17% in KZN and 34.8% in Gauteng.

In the meantime, much has changed on the ground.

Ministers from other parties are vying with ministers from the ANC to show that they are delivering. In some cases, this leads to disputes about who is really responsible for successes in government.

At the same time, services for many people in both Gauteng and KZN are failing.

Some parts of Joburg have had more water problems, while in eThekwini residents still complain that they are not getting proper services.

Also, more questions may now be asked about the ANC’s role in first installing, and then keeping Kabelo Gwamanda from Al Jama-ah in power as mayor of Joburg.

The former mayor has now been arrested in connection with an alleged funeral insurance scam that he was involved with before entering politics. Last week Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi said he did not believe Gwamanda had been properly vetted.

As The Citizen reported, this is despite previous assurances by the ANC that he had been vetted.

Lesufi, and the Gauteng ANC, clearly played a role in keeping a suspected criminal in power as mayor. And frankly, the ANC must have known at the time that Gwamanda had questions to answer.

This is a further demonstration of how far Lesufi has been prepared to go for power in local government in Gauteng.

His support for Gwananda flew in the face of the ANC’s official policy that it should provide the mayor in councils where it was the biggest party (of course, this is a policy that has again been ignored in Tshwane, where the mayor is now from Action SA – and it appeared this decision was endorsed by the ANC’s national working committee).

Read more: Politics of failure — Panyaza Lesufi’s populism may be running out of runway

All this is unlikely to impress voters. Instead, it is likely to further damage the ANC in local elections.

But it also shows how the ANC NEC’s decision of whether to disband the provinces’ leadership is also another front in a much bigger dispute.

Lesufi has been one of the few ANC office bearers to publicly suggest he opposes the current national coalition.

And this must surely complicate any decision about disbanding the province that he leads. It could open another faultline in this dispute within the ANC.

The MK factor

A careful balance