By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has dismissed speculation that he is planning to resign in the wake of the African National Congress (ANC) poor showing in the 2026 local government elections.
The ANC achieved the highest share of the vote at 30.76%, and it won 3,246 council seats, national vote share dropped from 45.59% in 2021.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) was the second-largest party with 24.64% of the vote and 1,695 council seats. uMkhonto weSizwe, finished third, followed EFF and ActionSA.
The ANC leads in 128 municipalities and won 53 municipalities outright. The DA leads in 32 municipalities and won 12 outright.
Only 74 of the 213 municipal councils in South Africa returned an outright majority for a single party, leaving 139 hung councils requiring coalitions.
The story of ANC decline is clear in the provinces and cities. The party won a majority in just one of the country’s nine provinces, Limpopo. In 2021 it won six. It also won the most votes in just two of the eight cities, compared with six at the last local elections.
Speaking to journalists after his address at the IEC results centre, the president quickly shut down speculation that he was resigning.
“I don’t know where these rumours come from. I mean, who came up with a rumour like that? It’s preposterous,” Ramaphosa said.
The president said the ANC had accepted the outcome of the elections and the message sent by voters.
“This is their verdict, and we accept it. We accept it with humility,” he said. It is a decline that is concerning, that is how I characterise it.”
It’s a continuing decline for the ANC, which lost its parliamentary majority in the national elections in 2024 for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994. It then had to form a coalition government with a raft of other parties in what is called the Government of National Unity (GNU).
South Africa now faces days of local coalition building, with the three metropolitan municipalities in the province of Gauteng, the country’s powerhouse, under particular scrutiny. The ANC may even find itself shut out in the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Parties now have 14 days from the moment results were announced to negotiate coalitions.
Meanwhile ANC in Sedibeng is preparing to approach the Electoral Court over alleged irregularities in the certified voters’ roll for Emfuleni, Midvaal and Lesedi in Gauteng’s Vaal Rand.
The ANC claims its analysis has uncovered thousands of voter records with missing residential addresses, unusually high numbers of registrations at individual properties and instances of identical identity details appearing across different voting districts.
ANC says the discrepancies do not necessarily suggest wrongdoing by individual voters, but insists they raise serious questions about the accuracy and integrity of the voters’ roll.
Among the examples flagged by the party are more than 1500 voters registered at a single address in Sebokeng and over 1200 at an address in Sharpeville. The ANC also claims that more than 32 000 voter records have no residential addresses.