“We are going down, comrades. We are on a downward spiral trend.”
Eastern Cape premier and ANC chair Oscar Mabuyane delivered the stark warning to party officials while addressing a workshop for provincial and regional executive committee members on the national general council documents in East London on Saturday.
Mabuyane said the 2026 local government elections represented a “make or break” moment for the ANC.
“We still have a chance of correcting the [party’s decline in support to 40%] but we’ve got just about a year to do that.
“If we fail there, I really don’t know. It would probably take another generation for the ANC to recover. That would be very sad.”
Mabuyane said the crisis facing the party was not the result of single failure, but a convergence of systemic challenges, strategic missteps and a “profound disconnect from the electorate”.
“We’ve been talking about this issue of a trust deficit for probably about 15 years that we’ve been observing ...The challenges we have are not unsurmountable.
“The party’s electoral base is fracturing ... the party’s vote share in metropolitan areas has plummeted, a clear signal that our liberation narrative no longer suffices.
“Simultaneously, [our] once unassailable rural heartland is showing signs of [declining support for the ANC].
“We are going down, comrades. We are on a downward spiral trend, whether in the rural or urban areas,” Mabuyane said.
He said the decline in support for the party was being compounded by challenges in its relationship with its alliance partners.
The SACP has made it clear that it will be contesting the local elections.
Mabuyane said the ANC was a party at “war with itself”, hamstrung by pervasive factionalism driven by vicious leadership contests.
He said this had weakened the alliance, resulting in trust plummeting among its allies.
Mabuyane said he believed there was a deliberate effort, “whether a third force or whatever” targeting the ANC in its Eastern Cape and Limpopo strongholds.
“The things that we are experiencing lately are not common. They are not normal.
“The ANC is now dependent on those two provinces, and unintentionally we invite enemies to really put those two provinces under microscopic review.
“It is about eroding the ANC base in those two provinces.
“We can sit here and talk about unity, but there’s a proper well-lubricated machinery to destabilise the ANC, and there’s no way the ANC will move about 40% towards 50% if there is further decline in these two provinces.
“We are the weakest ... We have a responsibility to create a conducive environment. Currently we are in that state of paralysis and confusion, a clear sign of regime change,” he said.
The Dispatch reported in April that 16 troubled Eastern Cape municipalities were slowly collapsing and had been flagged by the provincial government as being in financial distress.
The situation is so dire that projections indicated they might soon be unable to meet their financial obligations.
Mabuyane said some of the distressed local authorities should “not have been municipalities”.
He said some were not properly funded while others had been merged and that process had not been done properly to address the people’s needs.
He referred to the Lukhanji municipality, based in Queenstown (now Komani), which was merged with the Tsolwana and Inkwanca municipalities to form Enoch Mgijima local municipality, saying that before the merger, Lukhanji had never had financial problems.
Mabuyane said the merger was the start of the problem.
“We have deployed so many comrades there, senior comrades, who did trial and error. The person who destroyed Enoch Mgijima as a municipal manager has now left for the MK party,” he said.
The ANC’s second deputy secretary-general, Maropene Ramokgopa, told the gathering: “Service delivery is not happening because of politics ... The problem is that there is a lot of corruption. That is the challenge and that is us.”
Ramokgopa criticised municipalities that returned money to the National Treasury because they had not spent it on time.
She said the ANC, from branch level to the top, needed to have frequent visits and engagements with formations such as traditional leaders and churches and not approach them in the run-up to elections.
“People don’t trust us any more. If parents are voting for us and children don’t, what does that mean?
“It’s a challenge we really have to speak to because if we don’t do that, we will have a challenge.”
“We should also urgently ... restore trust, credibility and leadership so that the ANC once again becomes the vanguard that ... brings SA into a new decade of democracy,” Ramokgopa said.
Daily Dispatch
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