The ANC is overhauling how it picks its mayoral candidates for this year’s local government elections and the new framework may inadvertently open a door that has long been closed to the party’s elder statesmen and women.
A meeting to discuss the elections timeline last week also took up the idea of bringing experienced party veterans back into the fold, sources told Business Day.
Under the revised process, national officials will conduct interviews and make the final call on who becomes an ANC mayoral candidate, a significant departure from a system that has historically allowed provincial and regional structures to dominate those decisions.
The selected candidates will be measured against the minimum requirement set by the ANC’s national executive committee.
The shift matters because the old arrangement effectively gave regional power brokers the ability to block candidates they found inconvenient.
The new model strips that veto as structures may still submit names and make inputs but the final determination rests with national officials following a formal interview process. This is a noteworthy change for a party whose gatekeeping at regional level has shaped candidate lists for more than a decade.
“We need people who are experienced and can bring back the party’s lost voters,” an insider close to the talks said.
The party is only expected to finalise its mayoral candidates in June, coinciding with the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s voter registration weekend. The ANC will enter the home stretch of the campaign cycle well behind rivals who have been organising for months.
The ANC’s secretary of the electoral committee, Livhuwani Matsila, declined to comment on the push to bring back veterans into the fold but told Business Day that the party’s list processes are on track and electoral officers are being appointed at branch level.
“The BGM [branch general meeting] would produce four candidates. Then we go to the community meeting with the four candidates and present them in terms of their potentials and competencies, including capabilities they have,” he said.
“The process itself has got three stages. Phase one is the BGM, where the BGM would produce four candidates… The least favourite from the region is replaced by the one that is favoured by the community.”
The revised multistage process, which moves from branch nominations to a community meeting and then to a final branch vote ranked by show of hands, is designed in part to limit any manipulation, though Matsila conceded this can only be managed, rather than eliminated entirely.
Additional reporting by Hajra Omarjee
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