President Cyril Ramaphosa’s election announcement has fired the starting gun on several processes that may lead to important changes within our society – and the power balance in the ANC itself.
The announcement by President Cyril Ramaphosa that the local elections will go ahead on 27 October may well change several important dynamics within our politics. While it puts an end to demands that the elections be postponed because of the pandemic, the timing of the vaccination roll-out programme may also change the nature of the election itself.
Ramaphosa’s statement, published on Wednesday night, had several curious aspects to it.
First, as he says in the statement, it is not formally up to the president to officially announce the local election date – this is done by the cooperative governance minister. Ramaphosa says Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma will do this in due course.
But the statement also comes after an unexpected incident in Durban in KwaZulu-Natal last week where, while campaigning ahead of this week’s by-elections, Ramaphosa let it be known that the local elections would go ahead in October.
It would seem unlikely that Ramaphosa blurted that out by mistake. At the time, there were some voices in public…