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Given current polls, the African National Congress (ANC) would lose in the region of 500 councillors after the local government elections (LGE), due to be held in November.

This is according to an analysis conducted by The Common Sense.

In the 2021 election, nearly 8 800 municipal council seats were up for grabs, and the ANC won 4 548 of them.

In the upcoming LGE there will be slightly more seats available, at nearly 9 000.

However, The Common Sense estimates on current polling trends that the ANC will win only about 4 000 of those seats, meaning that the party will have about 500 fewer councillors than it did after the 2021 LGE.

The ANC wins more municipal council seats than its share of the vote would suggest, despite the proportional electoral system that South Africa uses. This is because of the mixed electoral system the country uses for municipal elections, with half of councillors being elected from geographical wards and the other half from party lists to ensure proportionality. However, the ANC’s support is spread more widely across the country than that of most other parties.

This allows the ANC to remain competitive in a far greater number of ward contests. A ward is won by the candidate who receives the most votes, even without an outright majority, so the ANC can take the entire seat with a relatively modest share of the votes, while opposition votes are divided among several parties. Normally, ward seats are deducted from the number of proportional representation seats awarded to a party. But when the ANC wins more wards than its overall vote share entitles it to, those seats cannot be removed. The result is that the party can secure a greater share of the seats on a council than its overall share of the vote would entitle it to in a purely proportional system.

These outcomes are replicated across the country, which means that the ANC wins more seats overall, countrywide, than its overall vote share would entitle it to.

This is shown in historical LGE results.

In 2021, the ANC won 46% of the vote and about 52% of the total seats up for grabs. There were similar patterns in 2016 and 2011. In 2016, the ANC won 54% of the total vote and about 60% of the available seats and in 2011, the party won 62% of the vote but 67% of the available seats.

Polling conducted by The Common Sense this year found that the ANC had the support of 39% of voters (new polling will be released this week). If that support level holds for the LGE then the ANC could expect to win about 3 500 of the 9 000 municipal seats countrywide. However, given that the ANC generally has a five-percentage-point gain on the proportion of seats it wins compared to the proportion of the vote it wins in LGEs, this means that the party could expect to win about 44% of the available seats, equivalent to about 4 000 seats.

The chart below shows the trend of ANC vote share and seat share between 2011 and 2021 and the projected numbers for 2026, based on polling.

The loss of 500 councillors would be a serious blow to ANC morale and to the party’s organisational strength. It would also weaken the party’s patronage machine significantly, which could hasten the ANC’s electoral decline.

A practical problem the ANC will face is that councillors who lose their jobs will demand new jobs elsewhere. Where these are not offered, those councillors may become resentful of their peers and threaten to expose the corruption that their peers have been party to, as is commonplace in South African municipalities. This will deepen internal party divisions to an extreme degree, making it increasingly difficult for the party’s head office to maintain order in the ranks.

The degree of those tensions can already be read in the extent to which assassinations of councillors is occurring in the run-up to the November polls. Several politically motivated assassinations or attempted assassinations are occurring every month in the country.