ANC’s ‘mea culpa’ on election candidates debacle - TimesLIVE

A confidential ANC report has laid bare the internal party weaknesses that led to chaos in the registration of candidates for the municipal elections and the omission of 51 mayoral candidates from the lists submitted to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC).

Although the ANC has taken the IEC to the Electoral Court in a bid to compel it to accept some of the missing candidates, blaming a “technical glitch” on the part of the commission, its internal report admits some of the major problems were the party’s own fault.

The report was presented to the party’s top officials, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, by its embattled secretary-general Fikile Mbalula on Monday. Last week the Sunday Times reported that Mbalula was facing a rebellion from ANC national executive committee members who blamed him for the chaos.

In the report, Mbalula explains how the party’s own bungles — including the late submission of some lists and the amendment of others at the last minute — resulted in it failing to register 51 of the people it had identified as its mayoral candidates for the November 4 elections.

Just over 20 of these were due to stand in metro councils and other municipalities the party identified as strategic.

Mbalula’s document reveals that the party’s Eastern Cape provincial secretary, Lulama Ngcukaitobi, submitted his province’s final list of candidates to the party’s operation centre just 29 minutes before the IEC deadline.

Mbalula identifies this as the main reason the registration debacle was most dire in the Eastern Cape, because four key municipalities were affected.

The secretary-general expresses suspicion that Ngcukaitobi “unlawfully and without mandate” altered the Eastern Cape list, unilaterally removing and adding names that were not sanctioned by the NEC.

Last week the Sunday Times reported that the registration bungle had led to the omission of such prominent people as the Rev Frank Chikane from the list. The respected party veteran had been named as a possible challenger to the DA’s Helen Zille for the post of Johannesburg mayor.

The report confirms that Chikane was left off the list despite Mbalula and party elections head Kgalema Motlanthe having instructed the party’s Johannesburg team to add it. The ANC has said all is not lost, because Chikane could still be added to the proportional representation list for the city when the window for amendments opens just after election results have been announced.

However, this is not the case for many others among the 51 would-be mayors missing from what was supposed to be a list of 206 such candidates.

“Of 206 comrades recommended for mayoral office across 48 municipalities, 51 appear on no list at all — 23 of them in the metros and the strategic cities, and 28 in local municipalities. Thirty-two municipalities are affected,” said Mbalula.

“A comrade who is on no list cannot be elected a councillor, and a person who is not a councillor cannot be elected mayor. The recommendation, in each of these 51 cases, cannot be given effect.”

According to Mbalula, provincial secretaries were given an instruction by senior NEC member Febe Potgieter to make sure that all the mayoral candidates were on their lists.

“The instruction was given and it was not carried out,” his report says.

“The final lists handed to the data capturers did not include [the recommended mayoral candidates]. On August 28 the secretary-general approved the lists for lodgement subject to four conditions, and the first of those conditions was that the centralised mayoral candidates who did not appear in the ordinary nominations be included in the lists as lodged.

“Section 1.1 sets that condition out. Between the instruction and the approval, the movement told its provinces twice to do this thing. The register shows it was not done,” Mbalula’s report says.

This is supported by a letter from Motlanthe, which is attached to Mbalula’s report.

In that letter, dated August 31, Motlanthe says that in relation to Chikane specifically, the ANC Gauteng provincial co-ordinator, Sochayile Khanyile, and the provincial list committee chair, Hilda Mally Mokoena, were given a clear instruction by the NEC to add him to their list before submitting the final version.

Motlanthe recommends that “the secretary-general should hold the provincial secretaries/PTT [provincial task team] co-ordinators accountable in all cases where the registration of mayoral candidates was deliberately not done”.

Mbalula demurs on this point, saying the term “deliberately” is not called for. He also takes issue with a recommendation by Motlanthe that some councillors in the relevant municipalities would have to resign immediately after the election to make way for the missing 51.

Mbalula says this “should not be actioned without a written opinion on the Municipal Structures Act vacancy and list provisions, and the officials should decide it as a question of principle rather than as an administrative remedy for this cycle’s failure”.

(Graphic: Nolo Moima/Sunday Times ) On the Eastern Cape, Mbalula’s report says the province’s entire list was submitted to the party’s operations centre by e-mail at “16h31”, in the expectation that it would be lodged and submitted by 5pm.

“Twenty-nine minutes. In that time the data centre had to receive the file, check it against what it already held, capture what had changed, and submit for every affected council in the province. The same report records, at paragraph 9.4, that the correction of 35 identity numbers had already consumed more than four hours earlier in the process, and that this is why the provincial list was finalised so late,” the report says.

This, Mbalula says, has nothing to do with the IEC system but was an internal ANC mess as the Eastern Cape leadership “left itself no margin”.

“The province’s own workbook confirms it. Version 4 of the Eastern Cape masterlist records its last save at 14h31 on August 28, two hours before the file reached the data centre and 2½ hours before the deadline,” reports Mbalula.

His version is supported by Motlanthe’s letter, which states that because of this late arrival of the list to the operations centre, “there was hardly no time to correct ID numbers at this juncture”.

Mbalula also suggests that Ngcukaitobi and some of those who were in charge of the Eastern Cape list effected changes that were not sanctioned by anyone and were made after the NEC had already ratified the lists.

He has appointed a firm to conduct a forensic investigation into what happened to the lists.