The ANC’s 2026 Manifesto Is a Confession
The ANC launched its 2026 Local Government Manifesto in Diepsloot on 23 August 2026, and the 64 page document contains an unusually frank account of how badly municipalities are performing. It concedes that only 15% of municipalities achieved a clean audit in 2024/25, that no metro achieved one, and that the funding model the ANC itself designed is broken. It then sets a 2031 target that is weaker than a promise the same party made in 2009 and missed. Nowhere in the document is there a stated consequence for missing any of it.
A manifesto that argues against itself
Most election manifestos are written to make a case for the party publishing them. The ANC’s 2026 Local Government Manifesto does that too, but along the way it assembles a detailed record of municipal failure that no opposition party would need to improve on.
The admissions begin on page 9. The manifesto states that only 15% of municipalities achieved clean audits in 2024/25, that this 15% represents just 8% of total municipal expenditure, and that no metropolitan municipality achieved a clean audit at all.
That middle figure deserves more attention than it will get. A clean audit means the Auditor-General examined the books and found the money properly accounted for and the rules followed. If the municipalities that managed it account for only 8% of what local government spends, then 92% of all municipal money in South Africa passed through municipalities that did not get a clean audit. The headcount figure describes how many municipalities are failing. The expenditure figure describes where the money is.
The same page concedes that too many municipalities operate with unfunded budgets and insufficient capital investment, that many cannot generate enough revenue to fulfil their constitutional duties, that municipalities carry substantial debt to Eskom and the water boards, that non-revenue water remains high, and that infrastructure maintenance spending sits below the Treasury norm. It states that local government reform can no longer be postponed or approached piecemeal.
Every one of those statements is accurate. Every one is also an account of the ANC’s own record.
The passive voice does a lot of work
What is striking is not the content of the admissions but the grammar.
Municipalities passed unfunded budgets. Frameworks towards professionalisation have been unevenly implemented. The funding model must be reformed. The document describes a failing system in the institutional third person throughout, and at no point does it say that the party publishing it is responsible.
The ANC has held national government without interruption since 1994. It drafted the 1998 White Paper on Local Government that designed the current system, and it authored the Municipal Structures Act, the Municipal Systems Act and the Municipal Finance Management Act that give effect to it. By its own count on page 8, the ANC retained outright majorities in 161 of the 213 directly contested metro and local municipalities at the 2021 election.
The manifesto is describing a system the ANC designed, legislated and governed, in language that suggests it arrived from somewhere else.
The target that was already promised, and missed
The sharpest comparison in the document is one it does not make itself.
In 2009 the ANC government launched Operation Clean Audit 2014 through the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs. It carried one headline commitment: every municipality in South Africa would achieve a clean audit by 2014.
By the 2014 deadline, roughly 40 out of 278 municipalities had one. In 2024/25, according to this manifesto, 39 out of 257 did. The number of municipalities with clean audits is lower today than it was at the deadline of a plan that promised all of them, and the percentage only rose because there are fewer municipalities in the country than there used to be.
The target in the 2026 manifesto appears on page 40, in the box headed OUR 2031 TARGET at the end of the section on municipal finances. It reads: at least 50% of municipalities achieving clean/unqualified audit outcomes.
Read the wording rather than the number. Clean and unqualified are two different Auditor-General outcomes. An unqualified opinion with findings means the financial statements are reliable but the municipality was found wanting on compliance or performance reporting. Folding the two together means a municipality with findings against it counts toward the target.
So a party that promised 100% clean audits by 2014 is now asking for a further 5 years to reach half, on a measure that is easier to satisfy.
The manifesto is not consistent with itself on this point either. Page 9 describes the 39 municipalities as having achieved clean audits. Page 42, listing the ANC’s achievements, describes the same 39 as having achieved clean and unqualified audits. The same number appears under two different definitions in the same document.
Six attempts at the same problem
Operation Clean Audit was neither the first nor the last national programme to fix local government. The sequence runs as follows.
The White Paper on Local Government in 1998 established the developmental local government model. Project Consolidate followed in 2004. The Local Government Turnaround Strategy came in 2009, alongside Operation Clean Audit. Back to Basics arrived in 2014, and a second iteration in 2018. The Local Government Action Plan ran through the term now ending, and the manifesto credits it on page 8 with placing greater emphasis on implementation, monitoring, measurable outcomes and accountability.
Now, in 2026, the manifesto reports that over the past two years the ANC reviewed the system of local government by examining its foundations, the 1998 White Paper.
The party is reviewing the founding design of the system because the system does not work. It wrote that design.
There is a smaller contradiction in the same area. Page 8 credits the Local Government Action Plan with having strengthened implementation and accountability. Page 49 commits the ANC to strengthening the Local Government Action Plan. If it worked, it does not need strengthening. If it needs strengthening, it did not work.
What happens if they miss
Academic work at the University of the Western Cape examining why Operation Clean Audit failed identified a structural reason: missing the targets carried no consequence for anyone.
The 2026 manifesto has a section addressing exactly this. Pages 60 and 61 carry a table headed MONITORING OUR COMMITMENTS. THE GUARANTEE. It sets out what the ANC will publish and when: public ward meetings every month, a repair clock published monthly by ward, a State of the Municipality Report within 60 days, a Ward Delivery Schedule within 100 days, quarterly Municipal Delivery Scorecards, an annual Manifesto Implementation Report, an independent mid-term review in 2028 and a Manifesto Delivery Report at the end of term in 2031.
Every line in that table is a commitment to publish something. Not one line states what happens if the commitment is not met.
A guarantee that carries no penalty for breach is a publication schedule.
Accountability that lives inside the party
The accountability architecture in the manifesto is extensive, and almost all of it belongs to the ANC rather than to the state.
The document commits to expanding ANC Service Delivery War Rooms and strengthening the ANC Service Delivery Line. Every ANC councillor will sign a Public Performance Agreement and a Code of Ethical Conduct. All elected ANC councillors must complete a compulsory three year ANC Local Government Leadership Certificate. The ANC’s Integrity Commission provides the mechanism for dealing with unethical conduct, and the Step Aside Rule requires members facing serious criminal charges to step aside while legal processes run.
None of these is a statutory instrument. A resident cannot enforce a performance agreement signed between a councillor and a political party. No court reviews the ANC Integrity Commission. The Step Aside Rule is an internal party resolution, and a party conference can amend it.
The manifesto also lists the recall of councillors under consequence management on page 46. A recall is the mechanism by which a party removes a public representative that voters elected. It is being offered to residents as a form of accountability to them.
Neither the Integrity Commission nor the Step Aside Rule is new to this manifesto. Both were in place through the term now ending. The relevant question is not whether the mechanisms exist but whether they have been applied consistently and at scale, and the manifesto does not report on that.
By contrast, the DA’s manifesto proposes that municipal accounting officers be held personally liable to repay losses caused by their action or inaction. Whatever one makes of the party, that is a mechanism enforceable by someone other than the party itself.
The phrase that never appears
The words cadre deployment do not appear anywhere in the 64 pages.
The effects of it are described precisely. Page 43 states that in too many municipalities, politicised appointments, blurred political-administrative boundaries, high turnover and prolonged acting appointments in senior posts, weak protection for lawful professional judgement, fragmented capability building and consultant dependency make the municipal administration unstable and vulnerable to corruption, weak performance and service failure.
That is an accurate description of the symptoms. The document does not name the mechanism that produces them.
The closest it comes is a single line on page 46 stating that senior municipal officials must not hold political party leadership positions. That prevents a municipal manager from serving as a branch chairperson. It says nothing about who selects the municipal manager.
Targets without a price
The manifesto commits, on page 24, to investing at least 8% of the value of every municipality’s assets annually in infrastructure maintenance and renewal. That is the National Treasury norm, which means it was already the standard and was already being missed.
On page 9 the same document records that the local government sphere receives less than 10% of the national budget and that many municipalities cannot generate sufficient revenue to fulfil their constitutional duties.
The proposed resolution is what page 38 calls a Radical Overhaul of the Municipal Fiscal Framework, to be completed as part of the White Paper review. That review is not finished, so the funding model that would pay for the maintenance target has not been designed yet.
Every rand figure in the manifesto describes the past. R50 billion secured in investment, R1.69 billion in losses recovered or prevented, more than R16 billion in assets recovered. Not one forward commitment in the document carries a cost.
Other targets face similar arithmetic. Page 24 commits to reducing non-revenue water to below 30% in every metropolitan municipality, and to eliminating E. coli contamination in water sources. Page 40 commits to reducing municipal debt owed to Eskom and the water boards by at least 30%, in a sphere where that debt has grown steeply over the term now ending, notwithstanding the Eskom Municipal Debt Relief Programme that the manifesto lists on page 37 as one of its achievements.
A national record in a municipal manifesto
The achievements listed across the six action areas are worth reading for what they are not.
Load shedding brought to an end. Lesotho Highlands Phase II and ten other bulk water projects advanced. More than 2.5 million opportunities through the Presidential Employment Stimulus. All three Gender-Based Violence Acts enacted. Removal from the Financial Action Task Force grey list. The Social Relief of Distress grant maintained. The National School Nutrition Programme expanded to approximately 9.7 million learners. 35 of 40 commuter rail routes restored. E-tolls ended in Gauteng.
Almost none of this is municipal. This is a local government manifesto whose track record is largely a national government track record, and the document does not point to a single municipality it holds up as a model.
The load shedding claim also carries a qualification the manifesto itself supplies. Page 19 records Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor improving from 54.56% in 2023/24 to 65.07% in 2025/26. The industry benchmark is 70%, so the fleet remains below it. The same page records that load reduction, which is a separate mechanism, has been eliminated in six provinces and is due to end nationally only in March 2027. And a significant part of the relief on the grid came from households and businesses installing their own generation, which is to say that South Africans paid for the solution and the party is claiming the result.
What is genuinely new
Two commitments in the manifesto are new and carry fixed deadlines, and both deserve to be tested rather than dismissed.
The first is Umhlaba Wethu, on page 13. Within 100 days, every ANC-led municipality is to publish a complete list of the land and buildings it owns, ward by ward, marking what is in use, what stands empty, what is leased, what is derelict and what is available. Hijacked buildings, dormant leases and unrecorded municipal property are where a substantial amount of local corruption operates. A public register would be a genuinely useful instrument, and 100 days is a date that can be checked.
The second is on page 58, and it is the most candid passage in the document. The manifesto states that for 30 years the direction of travel has been outward, listing cleaning, security, waste collection, meter reading, water tankering, plant hire and call centres, and says that the movement’s assessment is that this went too far, and that the municipality gave away the very functions it needed to keep in order to remain competent.
It then commits to a section 78 review of every outsourced core service in every ANC-led municipality within the first two years of the term.
This is the ANC stating in its own election manifesto that outsourcing hollowed out municipal capacity. Those contracts are also where a great deal of politically connected money sits, which is what makes the commitment worth watching.
The document as evidence
One detail in the published PDF sits outside the argument and says something on its own.
The passage on outsourcing on page 58 reads, in the published document: “For thirty years the direction of travel has been outward, (through the tender system?)”.
That is an unresolved editorial query. Someone drafting the manifesto left a question in the text for a colleague, and it was published that way.
It is not the only sign of a document that was not checked. On page 16 a bullet point about the informal settlement upgrading and human settlements programme appears twice in succession. On page 8 a sentence begins “The is to prepare for the next phase”. On page 57 the word measures appears as “measurers”, and on page 53 publish appears as “public”.
The manifesto is the first thing the ANC had to deliver in this campaign.
The conclusion the document invites
This is the most honest account of local government the ANC has produced, and that is precisely the problem.
Everything in it that is true is an admission of failure. Everything in it that is a promise has been promised before, in 1998, in 2004, in 2009, in 2014, in 2018 and in 2021. The targets that follow those promises carry no consequence for being missed, and the accountability mechanisms offered to enforce them are instruments the ANC controls and can suspend.
A party asking for a seventh attempt at a problem it has failed to solve six times is asking voters to accept that the difference this time is the quality of the document.
