EFF Rebuilds as ANC Faces Corruption and Governance Scandals

South Africa goes into the 4 November local elections with the African National Congress under pressure from voters, courts and its own campaign machinery. The IEC excluded 181 ANC candidates from proportional-representation lists in six municipalities after the party failed to complete submissions by the deadline. The ANC has taken the dispute to the Constitutional Court.

The damage is wider than one administrative failure. An Eastern Cape High Court ordered the ANC to hand over raw branch-meeting data sought by members who allege manipulation, ID harvesting and fraudulent activity in internal processes. The ANC has also removed NEC member Andile Lungisa from a municipal candidate list after what the party called adverse vetting findings. These are separate disputes, but together they reinforce a problem the party has struggled to escape: public anger over accountability, patronage and failing local government.

The Economic Freedom Fighters is trying to turn that opening into municipal power. In August, EFF deputy president Godrich Gardee said the party intended to contest 213 mayoral positions and 14,398 wards. The party later said it met the IEC deadline and filed candidates across every ward, with 4,474 candidates nationally. Its campaign is centered on jobs, public services, land reform, accountable local government and stronger state capacity.

That does not yet amount to a nationwide EFF surge. The party won 9.52% in the 2024 national election, and September 2026 Ipsos polling put it at roughly 11% nationally, behind the ANC, DA and MK Party. But the same polling put the EFF at 27% in Buffalo City, where support is far stronger than in most metros. The more accurate picture is a party rebuilding after its 2024 setback while finding specific places where the ANC’s decline has opened real space.

The EFF’s argument is not simply that it would administer the same system more cleanly. Its programme calls for land expropriation without compensation, nationalisation of mines and banks, stronger public institutions, expanded services and the replacement of tender dependence with state capacity. That puts the party inside a broader African debate over whether governments can use public power to direct development rather than merely manage scarcity — a question Pamphlets has also examined in our coverage of state power and development across Africa.

For the ANC, the danger is fragmentation. Voters angry about corruption or municipal collapse do not move in a single direction: some go to the DA, some to MK, some to the EFF and many disengage entirely. Ipsos found in March that 47% of South Africans said no political party represented their views. That makes the 2026 contest less a simple transfer of support than a fight over who can organize a deeply alienated electorate.

The EFF’s opportunity is therefore concrete but limited. It can point to ANC candidate-list failures, corruption allegations, weak municipal services and its own national organization. But it still has to prove that radical opposition can become durable local government. Buffalo City is the clearest current test: polling there shows the EFF close enough to the leading parties to matter, without showing that it has already displaced them.

South Africa’s local elections will not decide the country’s entire political future. They will show whether the ANC’s loss of automatic dominance continues, whether disillusioned voters stay home or reorganize, and whether the EFF can convert a left-wing programme into governing power rather than protest alone.