Mbalula, the IEC and the Missing Candidates
The ANC failed to complete the registration of some of its candidates before the IEC’s 17:00 deadline on 28 August, and may not appear on the ballot in municipalities it has governed for decades, including Mangaung metro. Secretary General Fikile Mbalula first said it had not happened, then blamed a fault in the IEC’s online system, and is separately investigating whether people inside the party removed approved names. The IEC says nothing on its system failed and that it has no power to reopen submissions. The ANC has gone to the Electoral Court, where its lawyers are running a narrower argument than the one the party keeps making in public.
What happened on 28 August
Nominations for the 4 November municipal elections closed at 17:00 on Friday 28 August 2026. The IEC’s online candidate nomination system had been open since 21 June, and the election was formally proclaimed on 7 August. Parties had more than 2 months to load their names.
Two kinds of candidate go onto that system. Ward candidates stand in a single ward and either win it or lose it. The party list is the ranked list of names a party draws its remaining council seats from, based on its share of the vote. A party with no valid names in for a municipality by the deadline does not contest that municipality.
The IEC says 2 274 candidates were entered onto the system but never finally submitted. Of those, 480 were party list candidates and 1 794 were ward candidates. They belong to 45 different parties, not to the ANC alone.
Chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo has said there is no route to reopening submissions on the system and no route to handing names in on paper, and that the matter is closed. The commission’s chairperson, Mosotho Moepya, has said the names were entered into the system but never sent, and that the commission would not speculate about why.
The denial, and what was happening inside the ANC that morning
On 29 August, the day after the deadline, Mbalula told the Sunday Times that reports of the ANC missing the deadline were untrue, that the party had submitted all its candidates and had paid in advance. He was asked specifically about the Eastern Cape.
According to the Daily Dispatch, on that same Saturday morning the ANC’s Eastern Cape provincial chairperson, Oscar Mabuyane, posted a message on the provincial executive committee’s WhatsApp group stating that a fault in the IEC’s system on the Friday had left the party unable to register full ward and party lists for Ngquza Hill and Port St Johns, and party lists for Walter Sisulu and Sundays River. Two senior ANC members told the paper they saw the message before it was deleted. That account is secondhand and the message is gone, so it should be read as a claim rather than as established fact. If it is accurate, the ANC’s provincial chairperson was telling his own executive the party had failed on the same day the secretary general was telling a newspaper it had not.
By Monday 31 August the ANC had issued a statement acknowledging technical problems on the commission’s system and saying a small number of its entries were being finalised together with the IEC.
The ANC’s public account
National spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu has given the fullest version of the party’s case in a studio interview. Her account is that every ANC candidate had been uploaded onto the system, and that on the final day a portion of them were rejected by the system as the last batch went in. She said the system malfunctioned towards the end of the uploading, and that the party calls it a technical glitch.
She also explained how the system is supposed to behave. Uploading a candidate normally produces a confirmation back to the user, and where something is wrong, an identity number that does not match or a surname that has changed on marriage, the system says so. Her account is that no such confirmations came back on the final batch.
On the numbers, Bhengu put the affected candidates at around 150 out of close to 10 000 the ANC lodged. Cyril Ramaphosa has put the figure nearer 181. Both are the party’s own estimates given days apart.
Two things in that interview cut against the impression that the ANC is accusing the commission of dishonesty. Asked twice whether the IEC was misleading the public, Bhengu declined, saying the party is not in the business of apportioning blame. She also said the ANC is not asking the commission to condone anything outside the rules, is not asking for candidates whose details were never uploaded, and is not asking for any reordering of lists.
Asked why the party was still working the system so late in the afternoon, Bhengu said it was certainly not at 17:59 or 16:59, and put the timing down to the ANC’s laborious candidate selection process, which includes community participation and vetting, and required a national executive committee, an extended national executive committee and a special national executive committee to ratify the lists because late changes kept arriving.
What the court papers say
The ANC has applied to the Electoral Court in Bloemfontein, a court that deals only with election disputes. It asks the court to set aside the IEC’s decision of 1 September and to declare that its lists and ward nominations for the affected municipalities were lawfully and timeously submitted. It seeks costs for 2 senior counsel and 2 junior counsel.
The affidavit sets out a timeline for the final half hour. At 16:34 the ANC’s administrators were logged out of the system and returned to the landing page. At 16:35 they tried to report the problem to the responsible IEC official. At 16:40 that official returned their call. At 16:57 they were logged out again. The deadline was 17:00.
That timeline sits awkwardly next to Bhengu’s answer on air. She was asked why the party was still submitting close to the deadline and said it was certainly not at 16:59. The party’s own sworn account describes its administrators still in the system at 16:57, and struggling with it from 16:34.
The municipalities named in the papers are Sundays River Valley, Walter Sisulu, Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape, uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal, and Mangaung metro in the Free State. All are ANC strongholds. Mangaung, which contains Bloemfontein, is a metro the party still runs on its own rather than in a coalition.
The legal argument is not the public argument
In court the ANC does not lead with the glitch. It argues that the word “submitted” in sections 14 and 17 of the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act covers electronic delivery, so completing the online forms and uploading the supporting documents before 17:00 amounts to lawful, timeous submission even where the system never recorded a final send. It leans on the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act of 2002 and says the commission’s reliance on a software status flag is legally wrong.
There is a reason for that framing. On 4 September the Electoral Court dismissed a similar application by the United Democratic Front, holding that the IEC has no power in law to exempt any party from a deadline set by statute.
The glitch argument, used as a reason to be admitted late, has already been tested and lost. In 2024 the Labour Party, the African Congress for Transformation and the Afrikan Alliance of Social Democrats missed the deadline for their national election candidate lists and blamed technical faults in the IEC’s online system. The Electoral Court dismissed them on 15 April 2024 and the Constitutional Court dismissed them on 20 May 2024. It is that judgment the Electoral Court reached for when it dismissed the UDF.
The 2024 Electoral Court ruling was not unanimous. Professor Moses Phooko wrote separately, taking the view that the complaints could not simply be treated as the parties’ own fault and that a digital divide formed part of the picture.
So the ANC cannot ask for more time, because nobody has the power to grant it. It has to argue that it was never late.
The other explanation
Mbalula has offered a second account that does not fit the first. He has opened an investigation into how the names of several prominent Eastern Cape candidates, approved by both provincial and national leadership, came off the final lists before submission. He has said the dispute with the IEC is not about late submission but about something having happened after submission. He has also said some candidates were rejected because of invalid identity numbers.
Frank Chikane, whom the ANC has been positioning for Johannesburg, was left off the party list. In Alfred Nzo district in the Eastern Cape a sitting mayor was left off.
One account has the ANC’s names uploaded and thrown out by the commission’s system. The other has people inside the party altering the lists. Only one of them is the IEC’s doing.
The ANC has stood here before
In August 2021 the ANC missed the deadline to register candidates for that year’s municipal elections. Jessie Duarte, then deputy secretary general, told a media briefing that the IEC’s system repeatedly froze and locked the party’s administrators out during the final hours before the deadline, that data already entered was voided and had to be entered again, and that many candidates’ identity numbers were rejected.
That is very close to the account the party is giving in 2026, including the rejected identity numbers.
Duarte said at the time the ANC could not field candidates in 35 of the country’s 257 municipalities. Reporting since has put the 2021 shortfall at 20 municipalities and 598 wards. The counts differ because they were taken at different points as the party caught up.
The ANC went to the Electoral Court in 2021 as well, and withdrew the case before it was argued. It did not need it. The IEC reopened candidate registration for every party, a decision the DA challenged and the Constitutional Court ultimately upheld, and the ANC put its names in.
The ANC’s head of elections in 2021 was Fikile Mbalula.
More than 350 of its own candidates removed
In the run up to the deadline the ANC removed more than 350 of its own prospective councillor candidates during vetting. The reasons given include criminal records, charges brought by the NPA, and failure to meet the party’s own educational requirements, which were published in an internal document in November 2025.
The party’s answer is that this represents roughly 3.5% of its candidate pool and that the removals show tougher screening working. That is a reasonable defence, and the criteria had been public within the party since late 2025.
It leaves a harder question. How did more than 350 people pass branch nomination, community input and provincial approval, and only fall over at the final check days before the deadline?
Mbalula under pressure, and what he said in Mpumalanga
At least 9 members of the ANC’s national executive committee believe Mbalula should be held personally accountable for the failure, according to the Sunday Times, with one saying he is a law unto himself.
At 00:36 on 8 September, Mbalula posted on X under the heading “THE TRUTH”. He wrote that he is the first stop and the buck stops with him, that Gwede Mantashe told him to expect people to say all sorts of things and cry at his office because he is the secretary general, that he is unbendable steel, that he takes responsibility and leads as secretary general, that people must never feel sorry for him, and that he understands the ANC and its people.
The clip attached to that post is not new. It is captioned 3 September 2026 and shows him addressing an ANC Women’s League gathering. It is a piece of an internal speech, posted after midnight while his own national executive colleagues were calling for him to carry the blame.
Nowhere in it does he say the ANC failed, or that a candidate is missing from a ballot because of anything the party did. He accepts the position of responsibility while leaving the cause exactly where he put it.
On 6 September, at a ceremony hosted by the Mathibela Royal Council in Mpumalanga, Mbalula told the gathering that the ANC is a big organisation that belongs to God, to the ancestors and to the chiefs, that it was born inside a church, and that people can try to destroy it but it is impossible, because it was formed by kings and built by priests. He said there is nothing wrong with the ANC, that the problem is with the individual, and that when an individual has messed up it does not matter who that person is, they must be arrested.
The history behind that claim is accurate. The ANC was founded on 8 January 1912 in the Waaihoek Wesleyan Mission Church in Bloemfontein as the South African Native National Congress, taking its current name in 1923. Chiefs and church organisations were present at the founding and its first president was the Reverend John Langalibalele Dube.
The claim is not that the organisation is old. The claim is that it cannot be brought down from outside. In the same week he made it, the only thing that has taken the ANC off a ballot paper anywhere in South Africa was the ANC.
The pattern
Set the explanations alongside each other. Johannesburg’s decline is the fault of the coalitions. The corruption is the fault of individuals rather than the organisation. The candidate lists are the fault of the IEC’s software. The names that came off the lists are the fault of someone inside the party who has not been identified, and who is being investigated by the same office responsible for the lists.
Four failures, four causes, and none of them the ANC.
Replacing the secretary general would not change that. Candidate submission falls under the secretary general, so the pressure landing on Mbalula is fair. But the next person in that office would reach for the same explanations, because the organisation has no established way of saying that something went wrong and that it went wrong here.
What happens next
The ANC held a media briefing at Luthuli House at 11:00 on 8 September. The notice announcing it said the briefing would give an overview of the candidate submission process and further confirm the party’s readiness to contest the elections. The letterhead on that notice carries the ANC’s slogan for the year: 2026, Year of Decisive Action to fix Local Government.
The IEC publishes the final candidate list on 16 September. At that point it will be known exactly which councils and which wards the ANC will not be contesting on 4 November. The Electoral Court may rule before then.
Whatever that number turns out to be, it will not have been the coalitions, the individuals or the commission.
