South Africans are voting in municipal elections on Wednesday, 4 November, amid reported frustration over unreliable local services and concerns about the condition of municipal finances. The election will determine who controls councils responsible for services including water, sanitation and rubbish collection. The vote is still under way, and no results are reported in the supplied evidence.
The African National Congress (ANC) is expected by pre-election polling to win less than a third of the national vote, according to the Guardian’s account. That is a forecast, not a result: the party could still emerge as the largest, and the supplied polling evidence cautions that its figures are not predictions of final outcomes.
What voters are choosing
Voters choose councillors and parties rather than directly electing mayors. Councillors then elect mayors, making the composition of each council and the negotiations that follow the vote central to who will lead local government. The Electoral Commission has up to a week to announce final results, after which parties have two weeks to form councils and elect mayors, the Guardian reports.
That process means a party’s vote share does not by itself determine who governs a municipality. In places where no party secures control, coalition discussions can shape council leadership. The Guardian reports that fragmented voting could leave the ANC leading some city coalitions while losing others.
The two supplied reports differ on how many mayors Johannesburg has had over the past decade: one says 10, while the Associated Press gives a count of nine. The discrepancy means neither figure can be presented as definitive here. Both accounts describe repeated leadership changes and a fragile ANC-led coalition in the city.
Services and municipal finances in focus
Pre-election coverage has highlighted complaints about water shortages, unreliable electricity and other visible failures in local services. The Associated Press reported that more than 500 people in Pretoria were treated for stomach illnesses after drinking contaminated water the previous week. That report does not establish a formally confirmed cause, so it should not be treated as proof that a specific municipal failure caused the illnesses.
Financial and audit figures cited in the Guardian’s Johannesburg report point to broader pressures facing local government. It says 39 local governments, or 15%, received a clean audit for the 2024–25 financial year, and cites a parliamentary budget office report finding that two-thirds were financially distressed. These figures describe municipal conditions reported before voting, rather than the result of the election.
Johannesburg faces particular infrastructure concerns. The city has admitted to a R220bn infrastructure backlog, according to the Guardian, which also estimates that a quarter of municipal water purchases are lost through leaks. Those figures help explain why infrastructure and service delivery have featured prominently in reporting ahead of the vote, but they do not establish one cause for the problems.
Analysts quoted by the Guardian have linked high political turnover to poor service delivery. The Associated Press says instability has been widely blamed for infrastructure deterioration and financial mismanagement in Johannesburg. These are attributed explanations, not settled findings that political turnover alone accounts for service failures.
A changing political landscape
The ANC’s projected performance would be significant against the party’s recent electoral record, though comparisons across different kinds of elections need care. The Guardian reports that the ANC won 45.6% in the 2021 municipal elections and 40.2% in the 2024 national election. Those figures refer to separate contests and do not provide a direct measure of how the party will fare in the current municipal vote.
The Associated Press reports that the ANC lost its parliamentary majority in 2024 and formed a unity government with the Democratic Alliance and smaller parties. It also says the ANC lost control of several major cities in the 2021 municipal elections. That context helps explain why council control and coalition bargaining are consequential, but it does not settle the outcome of the election now under way.
The polling cited in the coverage should also be read with its limits in mind. Ipsos interviewed 3,600 people between 12 September and 13 October, with a registered-voter subset of 2,533 used for voter-preference findings. Ipsos says those figures are not a prediction of final results and may change. A separate Guardian report gave October polling ranges for Johannesburg, with the Democratic Alliance at 29–36% and the ANC at 22–27%. Those city estimates are not national figures.
Once voting concludes, the official results and the ensuing council negotiations will determine which parties lead municipalities and who becomes mayor. Until those steps are complete, reported public grievances and pre-election surveys provide context, not evidence of how voters ultimately decided.