ANC’s ‘purge without a plan’ may create the opposition it fears

With just weeks to South Africa’s 4 November local government elections, the African National Congress (ANC) has made one of the most consequential interventions of its campaign: removing more than 350 councillor candidates from its lists following vetting concerns including criminal records and qualification requirements.

The principle of vetting candidates is difficult to fault. Political parties should demand integrity, competence and credibility from those they put before voters.

But campaigns are not judged only by whether a decision is right. They are judged by whether it is made at the right time, executed in the right way and accompanied by a strategy for managing its political consequences.

On that test, the ANC has a problem.

This was not simply a candidate clean-up exercise. It was an intervention into hundreds of local political ecosystems immediately before an election.

Every candidate removed from a list represents more than a name. Behind that candidate may sit a branch structure, activists, volunteers, community relationships, local funders, family networks and voters who have spent months believing that this individual would represent them. Removing the candidate does not remove that political infrastructure.

The critical campaign question therefore becomes: Where does that support now go? That is the question the ANC should have answered before embarking on a purge of this scale.

Vetting should happen prior to campaigning

The timing exposes a deeper organisational weakness. The Electoral Commission of SA’s candidate-list deadlines leave little room for political recovery. Candidates removed this late have limited opportunity to challenge decisions internally, and virtually no meaningful runway to reposition themselves elsewhere.

A functioning candidate-selection system should identify serious problems long before a campaign reaches this stage.

If hundreds of problematic candidates survive internal processes until the final stretch of an election campaign, the failure is not merely with the candidates. It is with the system that selected them.

Political parties should know who is representing them before those individuals are embedded into branches, communities and campaign structures. Late vetting turns an administrative problem into a campaign crisis.

In campaigns, timing is strategy

There is an old lesson in political strategy: power does not lie simply in the ability to act. It lies in knowing when to act. A decision taken at the wrong moment can produce consequences more damaging than the problem it was intended to solve.

The ANC has chosen to undertake major political surgery while simultaneously trying to mobilise voters. That is extraordinarily risky.

The party now has to persuade communities to vote ANC while potentially explaining why some of the very people who have been campaigning under its banner are suddenly no longer considered suitable to represent it.

That creates confusion at precisely the moment when campaigns require clarity. Worse, it potentially creates resentment among the people campaigns depend upon most: activists on the ground.

The most dangerous campaign is the one you can’t see

The greatest danger is not that every purged candidate will publicly defect. That would actually be easier to manage. The more difficult threat is decampaigning.

Decampaigning rarely announces itself at a press conference. It happens quietly:

• A branch activist stops knocking on doors.

• A local organiser who previously mobilised 500 people brings 100.

• WhatsApp groups become silent.

• Influential community figures stop defending the party.

• Transport arrangements mysteriously fail on election day.

• A candidate publicly says they remain loyal to the organisation while privately telling supporters to “vote according to their conscience”.

• Others simply stay home.

This is one of the most difficult forms of political resistance for a campaign to counter because it operates below the radar.

The ANC therefore faces an uncomfortable possibility: some of the people it has removed from its candidate lists could remain inside its political structures while quietly weakening its campaign. The party may not know the scale of that damage until votes are counted.

Candidate selection is now part of electoral competition

There is also a larger structural question. The ANC’s traditional candidate-selection culture was built during an era when internal standing, organisational loyalty and deployment carried enormous weight.

But South African politics has changed. The ANC is no longer operating in a political marketplace where voters have limited alternatives. The DA, EFF, uMkhonto Wesizwe party, Patriotic Alliance and smaller formations are competing aggressively for candidates, activists, local influencers and political talent.

That means candidate selection itself has become part of electoral competition.

A locally respected individual rejected by one party can become an asset to another. A disgruntled branch can become an opposition organising opportunity. An internal ANC dispute can quickly become somebody else’s campaign strategy.

The party therefore cannot treat candidate management as an internal administrative exercise. It is part of the battlefield.

ANC risks manufacturing its own opposition

The purge also arrives amid existing tensions over representation, particularly demands from younger members for greater space on candidate lists.

That matters. A campaign cannot afford multiple internal constituencies simultaneously questioning whether the candidate-selection process is fair, transparent and credible.

The ANC is therefore fighting on two fronts:

1. Externally, it must persuade an increasingly fragmented electorate to vote for it.

2. Internally, it must persuade activists and disappointed aspirants that they still have a reason to campaign enthusiastically for candidates who replaced them.

The second battle may ultimately determine the first.

This is where political organisations need credible mechanisms for managing internal fallout before grievance becomes rebellion. Other parties on the continent have experimented with institutionalised reconciliation and mediation structures precisely because internal political disputes do not disappear simply because the leadership has made a decision.

Aggrieved political actors need somewhere to go. Without credible mechanisms for resolving those disputes quickly, their next destination may be the opposition. The missing question: What is the reintegration strategy?

This is the question the ANC now needs to answer urgently.

• What happens to the more than 350 people who have been removed?

• Are they simply discarded?

• Are they expected to campaign enthusiastically for their replacements?

• Who is engaging their branches?

• Who is mapping their political influence?

• Which wards are vulnerable?

• Which removed candidates command genuine grassroots followings?

• Which ones could materially affect turnout?

• Which opposition parties are already approaching them?

• And, most importantly: What is the strategy for keeping their supporters inside the ANC coalition?

These are campaign questions, not administrative questions.

A sophisticated campaign should already have a political-risk map covering every affected ward. Not every purged candidate represents the same threat. Some may have little independent political capital. Others may command networks capable of moving hundreds or thousands of votes. Treating them identically would therefore be another strategic mistake.

Elections punish organisational mistakes

The ANC enters this election already defending ground lost in previous local government contests and facing an increasingly competitive opposition landscape. It cannot afford to manufacture additional opposition from within its own structures. This is why the lesson from the purge is bigger than the ANC. 

Vetting is necessary. Competence matters. Integrity matters.

But campaigns are systems. Candidate selection, organisational management, mobilisation, political communication, data and voter contact cannot be treated as separate exercises. A decision taken in one part of the campaign creates consequences somewhere else.

The ANC may have attempted to solve an integrity problem. It may simultaneously have created a mobilisation problem. And in an election, the second problem can be more immediately dangerous than the first.

This is because elections are ultimately decided not by how many problematic candidates a party removes from a spreadsheet, but by how many voters its political machinery can persuade and mobilise when polling day arrives.

The ANC therefore has very little time to answer the question that should have been answered before the purge began: What is the campaign strategy for the people you have just politically displaced?

Without one, this was not strategy. It was triage. And come 4 November, choices will have consequences. DM