Media Statement

Fellow South Africans. Distinguished members of the media. Comrades. The African National Congress comes before you at a moment of significance in our young democracy, and we begin by thanking each of you in the media for being present at this briefing. Your work as the medium – eyes and ears of our people is part of the constitutional fabric of this Republic. We thank you for the discipline and seriousness with which you cover the affairs of our movement and our country, and we welcome you to this briefing of the African National Congress, we have just concluded our Report to the National Executive Committee.

Allow me, before I turn to the substance of the National Executive Committee deliberations, to direct very particular appreciation to the Honorable Chief Justice of the Republic, Justice Mandisa Maya, and to her sister and brother Justices of the Constitutional Court. On Friday the 8th of May 2026, the Constitutional Court delivered a complex judgment on a matter of significant constitutional importance. The Honourable Chief Justice delivered that judgment with an even tone and an admirable, teachable temperament that this country can and must learn from. Hers is the leadership of a stateswoman of the law. Hers is the example to which every officer of our courts, every Member of Parliament, every public servant, and indeed every cadre of our movement can aspire.

In a few short months, the people of South Africa will mark the thirtieth anniversary of our Constitution, that document born of the negotiations led at Kempton Park and consolidated by the Constitutional Assembly, which gave us, in 1996, our supreme law. The African National Congress is the movement that, with the people of South Africa, wrote this Constitution. The African National Congress is the movement that honours it. The example of the Honourable Chief Justice this past Friday is the example of South Africa at its best, a nation in which the courts speak with measured authority, the political institutions  respond with maturity, and the people retain their faith in the institutions they helped to build.

The Chief Justice’s example tells us that we are, in this thirtieth year of our Constitution, together in building this country. The issues of law that arise from time to time, including the one that brings us before you tonight, are being resolved not as moments of crisis but as moments of growth, moments through which our young democracy is strengthened, through which the firm constitutional Republic envisaged in the Freedom Charter of 1955 is brought ever closer to its fullest expression. Every judgment of our courts, including the judgment of this past Friday, is part of that growth path. The African National Congressstands behind that growth path. The African National Congress will continue to stand behind that growth path.

I now turn, comrades and friends, to the substance of the matter. The National Officials of the African National Congress have, over the past three days, met to consider the judgment of the Constitutional Court in detail. We received the considered opinion of senior counsel. We tabled a Report to the National Executive Committee. The National Executive Committee has met in Cape Town, has considered our Report, and has just risen with its decisions.

The first thing the African National Congress wishes to communicate to the people of South Africa, plainly and clearly, is what the Constitutional Court did and did not order on Friday. The Constitutional Court did not order an impeachment trial of the President. The Court did not find the President guilty of anything.

The Court did not direct that the President be removed from office. The Court did not endorse the findings of the Section 89 Independent Panel. The judgment, in the words of the Honourable Justice Majiedt in the third of three judgments, is concerned with the procedural conduct of the National Assembly and the rules under which it acted. It is not, in any respect, a finding on the merits of the matter.

What the Court did do, the Court did with the precision and care that we have come to expect from our Constitutional Court. The Court declared one rule of the National Assembly; Rule 129i; to be inconsistent with the Constitution. The Court set aside the resolution of the National Assembly of 13 December 2022.

The Court read in an interim text to fill the gap until the National Assembly itself amends its rules. And the Court referred the Independent Panel report to an Impeachment Committee that must, in the first instance, be constituted under the corrected rules. The work of the National Assembly therefore now follows the working of its own rules. That is the architecture of the Constitution. That is the constitutional Republic in operation.

The next operative step under the Rules of the National Assembly is the work of the Subcommittee on Review of National Assembly Rules. That Subcommittee must, in the first instance, draft a new and permanent Rule 129i that gives effect to the judgment. The Rules Committee will then consider that draft.

The House will then adopt it. The Speaker of the National Assembly, the Honorable Thoko Didiza, will then programme the further steps. The African National Congress respects the constitutional independence of the Speaker and her programming of the work of the House. We will participate in every step of that process – fully, constructively, and with the discipline and dignity that this movement has always brought to work of the people’s Parliament.

Allow me now to speak to a question that has occupied the press in the days since the judgment was

delivered. The President of the African National Congress, who is also the President of the Republic, has;

like every citizen of our beloved country; the right to a fair hearing and the right to seek judicial review

where it is available to him. The Constitutional Court itself, at paragraph 139 of the lead judgment,

expressly preserved the path of review of the Independent Panel report. After receiving and carefully

considering the senior counsel opinion, the National Officials have recorded our unanimous support for

the President’s decision to lodge that review application in the High Court at Pretoria, accompanied by

any other legal procedures as his lawyers may advise. The National Executive Committee has, this evening,

endorsed that approach unanimously.I want to be very clear about something, on behalf of the African National Congress. The exercise of

constitutional rights by a citizen of the Republic; including a citizen who holds the office of President; is

not an evasion of accountability. It is the substance of accountability. Accountability under our

Constitution is exercised through institutions and through the rights those institutions guarantee. To

suggest that the President should not exercise the constitutional remedies that the Court itself preserved

is to suggest that the office of President strips a person of rights that every other South African enjoys.

That is not the position of our Constitution. That is not the position of the African National Congress, the

movement that helped to write that Constitution.

I now wish to put a matter, that the public discourse has been speculating about, firmly and finally to rest.

The National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, in the meeting that has just risen,

did not consider and was not asked to consider; the recall of the President of the African National

Congress. Resignation was not on the table. None of those matters were on the table. The National

Executive Committee reaffirmed, in clear and unambiguous terms, its full and continuing support for the

President of the African National Congress, Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa, as the leader of this movement

and, in that capacity, as the leader of the Government of National Unity.

The President of the African National Congress holds his office on a mandate from the branches of the

African National Congress. Those branches elected him to a five-year term at the 55th National

Conference at Nasrec in December 2022. The next National Conference of the African National Congress

is in December 2027. The mandate of the President from the branches of the African National Congress

is intact. We will not, as a movement, allow speculation in the press, however energetic, to substitute for

the constitutional moments of our movement; and those constitutional moments are the conferences of

the African National Congress, the deliberations of the National Working Committee, and the considered

decisions of the National Executive Committee.

The President of the African National Congress is also the President of the Republic of South Africa, elected by the National Assembly under section 86 of the Constitution following the May 2024 general election.

He was elected on the platform of an African National Congress whose voters, across every province and every community of our country, returned the movement to government; though to government in a new form, that of the Government of National Unity that the African National Congress holds together with our nine partners in the Statement of Intent of 30 June 2024. The President’s mandate from the people of South Africa, given through the ballot, is a mandate to do the work of the State. That mandate is intact.

The President will continue to do the work of the State on behalf of the people who entrusted him with that mandate. And so, comrades, members of the media, fellow South Africans, the work continues. The African National Congress, on the 8th day of January 2026, declared this year the Year of Decisive Action to Fix Local Government and Transform the Economy. The work of that declaration continues uninterrupted by the events of this past Friday. The branches of the African National Congress are being rebuilt as activist branches across the length and breadth of our country. The manifesto consultations are on course. The candidate selections are in train.

The 4th of November 2026; the day on which the people of South Africa will go to the polls in the Local Government Elections; is the focus of our movement’s daily work.The judgment of the Constitutional Court does not interrupt the work of the State. The judgment of the Constitutional Court does not interrupt the work of the branches. The judgment of the Constitutional Court does not interrupt the work of the Government of National Unity. The parliamentary process that the judgment has activated will run its course. The legal process that the President has the right to pursue will run its course. Both processes will be conducted with the dignity, the seriousness, and the constitutional fidelity that the people of South Africa expect of their institutions. And while those processes run their course, the work of governing and the work of building a better life for our people will not pause for a single day.

Allow me to close where I began. The example of the Honourable Chief Justice Mandisa Maya, on Friday the 8th of May 2026, is the example of South Africa at its best. In a difficult matter, our highest Court spoke with measured authority. Our Parliament will, in the weeks ahead, do its work in the same spirit.

The President of the Republic will continue to do his work in the same spirit. The African National Congress, the oldest national liberation movement on the African continent, will continue to do its work in the same spirit. Together, as a movement, as a Government of National Unity, and as a nation, we will walk through this moment as we have walked through every moment of our young democracy — with discipline, with dignity, with humility, and with our eyes fixed on the better future our forebears taught us to imagine.

Comrades, members of the media, fellow South Africans, we stand at a defining moment of our democracy. Our people are watching. History is calling. The future is waiting. The African National Congress will be there to meet them; at the Constitutional Court, in the National Assembly, in the Government of National Unity, and at every branch in every community of this country we love.

The system of governance, the State established by the ANC from 1994 is working the way it was designed to work – Our democracy, our constitutional democracy is strong, it will remain strong under the ANC.

Rights will be protected. There shall be accountability for all. No one is above the law and none one is under the law. We are equal. What it good for one, must be good for the other.

The President’s rights with personhood are also contained in the Constitution. The ANC wants to make it clear that; We are in our Renewal and Regeneration PEOPLE’S NEEDS FIRST! ECONOMIC

TRANSFORMATION FIRST! NO RETREAT!

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