The ANC’s chief whip and head of elections, Mdumiseni Ntuli, sat down with Daily Maverick to discuss the ANC potentially becoming a rural party, the ANC succession race and maintaining its 40% in the next elections. The ANC’s midterm report at the National General Council (NGC) this week not only confirmed the party’s decline but also suggested it is increasingly becoming a rural organisation, with most of its functional branches now concentrated in Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape. This, according to the ANC’s chief whip and head of elections, Mdumiseni Ntuli, is an indication that the party is nearing its death.
“If you become a purely rural party, it’s essentially a signal that you are coming to an end,” he said. The report, presented by ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, confirmed that the party’s decline was not sudden but a slow erosion over many years, starting in 2016. It also shows that ANC membership numbers have dropped by almost 30% since 2019, when they stood at 769,870.
Between 2019 and 2024, the former governing party’s voter support dropped by 17 percentage points nationally to 40%, leading to the formation of the Government of National Unity (GNU) with other parties, including the Democratic Alliance, Inkatha Freedom Party and the Patriotic Alliance. The party also failed to garner majorities in KwaZulu-Nata, Northern Cape and Gauteng. The decline of the party is giving Ntuli a headache, especially as the country heads to the 2026 local government election.
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Many ANC heavyweights believe the party can recover lost ground and possibly return to its former glory. Ntuli, however, is not entirely optimistic. He is hoping that the party at least maintains what it has.
“The state of the ANC is very worrying, even more worrying for me, because I’m the head of elections. I’m going to elections next year. I have all the reasons to be concerned about the capacity of the ANC, at least to sustain the 40% we have,” he said.
“I know other people are very ambitious. They are looking at us getting more than what we brought in 2021, before. But for me, as a head of elections, the basic thing that has changed is that we must defend what we have.
If we have a possibility to increase it, so be it. But we have to start by saying, what do we have and how do we secure it?” Ntuli said.
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