Media Statement

Fellow South Africans,

Good day. The African National Congress addresses the nation from the National Results Centre of the Electoral Commission, as our country concludes another chapter in the democratic story we began together in 1994.

Before the numbers, the lives

Before anything is said about numbers, something must be said about lives. This election period, like too many before it, took from us South Africans who were killed in political violence, across the political divide and in more than one province. Some were candidates, some were officials, and some were ordinary citizens who did nothing more than serve their communities.

We ask every South African, wherever you are, to join us now in a moment of silence in their memory.

Let us honour them. On behalf of the African National Congress we say plainly that there is no seat, no council and no office in this country worth a single human life. Political violence is a crime against our democracy and against our humanity, and we condemn it without reservation, whoever its authors and whoever its victims.

In the darkest days of our transition, when this country stood on the edge of civil war, President Nelson Mandela called us back from that edge. He appealed to South Africans of every persuasion to lay down the instruments of violence and to settle our differences by the ballot and never by the bullet. That appeal is not history. It is instruction. We dishonour his memory, and the memory of all who died for our freedom, when we allow the gun to re-enter our politics. The African National Congress will have no part in it and will give no quarter to it.

We call on the South African Police Service and on the National Prosecuting Authority to treat these killings with the utmost seriousness, to pursue not only those who pull the trigger but those who order and finance these crimes, and to protect the witnesses who are brave enough to speak. Impunity is the oxygen of political violence and it must be cut off.

We pause also to honour the members of the South African Police Service who lost their lives during this period, in the line of duty and outside of it. They stood between our democracy and disorder, and we owe them our gratitude and our mourning.

To their families, and to the families of all who were taken, the African National Congress extends its deepest condolences.

On the election and our democracy

The African National Congress thanks the Electoral Commission of South Africa, its Chief Electoral Officer and its officials, the tens of thousands of electoral staff, the party agents of every party, the observers and our security services, for an election that was peacefully administered and efficiently run. This movement has every confidence that these elections were free and fair, and we accept their outcome. Tomorrow the Commission will formally declare the result, and the Head of State, His Excellency President Matamela Ramaphosa, will officiate. We respect that process and we await it.

We thank the observer missions who watched over this election and vouched for its integrity: our domestic observers and our civil society, the missions of the Southern African Development Community and of the African Union, and the internationalobservers who travelled to be with us. We thank the fraternal organisations and the sister liberation movements of our region

and of the world, who have stood with the people of South Africa through every chapter of this democracy. And we thank the members of the diplomatic corps accredited to our Republic. Your presence honours our democracy and your solidarity strengthens it.

The result: we did not do well

Let the African National Congress say the first thing plainly, before anyone says it for us. We did not do well in this election.

Our support has fallen. We have lost councils we have governed for a long time, including places that have been the home of this movement for generations. There is no way to dress that up and we will not try to.

As the count draws toward its close the African National Congress stands north of thirty-one per cent of the national vote and remains the largest party in the country. We say that not as a boast but as a statement of the responsibility the people have left in our hands, and it is a smaller mandate than the one they gave us before. A party that has just been told to do better does not stand before the nation to celebrate arithmetic.

This election was contested by a very large number of political formations, more than at any local government election in our history. The vote has fragmented accordingly. More than one hundred councils have returned no outright majority and are held by no single party. In those places the shape of government will be settled in the days that follow. The final figures rest with the Commission, which declares them tomorrow, and the African National Congress will not pre-empt that declaration.

The direction, however, is plain. The people have given no party a free hand, and they have asked all of us to work together.

We should not let the ordinary miracle of the day pass us by. Once more, millions of South Africans walked to a voting station, stood in a queue and chose their own government in peace. There are nations far older than ours that cannot do this. The right to vote was not given to us. It was won, over a century, at a terrible price. That so many of our people exercised it again, and that more came out than at the last local elections, is itself a victory for the democracy we fought for. To every South African who voted, for whatever party, we say thank you. You are the democracy, and you are the reason the freedom fighters did not die in vain.

An honest word about local government

The country deserves an honest conversation about local government itself.

Local government is the most difficult sphere of our state. It is where the promises of the Constitution meet a tap, a pothole, a street light, a landfill and a billing system. It carries the heaviest service burden on the narrowest revenue base and the thinnest pool of skills. Many of our municipalities inherited boundaries and settlement patterns that were designed under apartheid to fail, and were then asked to deliver a modern standard of service to households that have never been able to pay for it. None of that is an excuse. It is the terrain, and any party that wins a council will meet it within a week.

Where we have fallen short, this movement does not dispute it. Communities have gone without water. Refuse has not been collected. Roads have not been maintained. Accounts have been wrong and have gone unanswered. In some places money that belonged to the people was not spent on the people, and the consequences were borne by households that could least afford them. Our volunteers heard this at every door, and they brought it back to us, and we are not going to pretend otherwise at a results centre.

Coalition government in our municipalities has too often been unstable. There are councils in this country where the mayoralty has changed three and four times in a single term, where budgets were not passed on time, where senior officials could not plan beyond a month, and where the first casualty was always the resident. A council consumed by its own politics cannot fix a pump. The African National Congress says to every party that will sit in these councils: whatever arrangements emerge, the service of the people must come first and must be insulated from our quarrels. Stability in a municipality is not a favour that parties do one another. It is a duty we owe the household at the end of the line.The African National Congress hears its people

To the millions who voted for the African National Congress, in the metros, in the towns and in the villages that have kept faith with this movement generation upon generation: thank you. You have kept this movement the largest political home in our country and we do not hold that lightly. In many municipalities you have returned us to office, and there we will govern, and govern better.

The people have spoken, and this movement must have the honesty to hear all of what they have said. Part of it is an embrace and part of it is a judgement, and we will not soften the judgement to comfort ourselves. In the words of the scripture that so many of our people live by, we have been weighed in the balance, and where we have been found wanting we dare not quarrel with the scale. The Freedom Charter, the founding charter of our democratic vision, declares that the people shall govern, and in this election the people exercised that sovereignty over the African National Congress itself. Ours is a national democratic revolution whose only purpose is to change the lives of the people. When the people tell us we have fallen short of that purpose, the honest answer is not to argue with them but to go home and put our house in order.

In the wisdom of our own languages, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person only through other people. The African National Congress is nothing apart from the people who made it. We are a river and the people are our source, and a river that forgets its source will surely run dry. We do not intend to run dry. We intend to return to the source and to be worthy of it once again.

This movement is ready to change

The African National Congress will not answer this result with explanations. It will answer it with change, and it is ready for that change and prepared for what it will cost.

We will rebuild from the branch upward, because a movement that is weak at the branch cannot be strong anywhere else. We will be hard on conduct in government, and harder on those who treat public office as private property. We will choose our public representatives for competence and for character, and not for faction. We will mend what is broken in our own house before we ask the people for anything again. And we will measure ourselves not by the next election but by the grandmother waiting for water, the young person waiting for work and the household waiting for a street light that works.

This is a new era in the politics of our country, and it is a new era for this movement. The African National Congress enters it clear-eyed. We do not fear it.

The national government, at the service of every municipality

Let something be said today that every South African should hear, wherever you live and however you voted. The African National Congress leads the national Government of National Unity. It holds the Presidency and the great instruments of the national state. That government serves every municipality in this country, all two hundred and fifty-seven of them, not according to how a community voted but according to the Constitution, which binds the national government to support local government everywhere and to secure the basic services and the dignity of every household.

Through the equitable share that funds every municipality; through the infrastructure grants that build water, electricity, sanitation and roads; through the District Development Model that brings the three spheres of government to work as one;

and through the duty of the national government to support, and where necessary to intervene, when a municipality fails its people, the African National Congress will use the lever of the national government to improve the lives of people in every local municipality in this land. Where we govern the council, we will govern it well. Where we do not, we will not abandon the people who live there. A child without water in a town this movement did not win is still a child of this country, and the Constitution knows no party when it comes to the dignity of the people. This is what we mean when we say: people first.

Whatever our standing in any council, the African National Congress remains a national force for good governance, and it will conduct itself as one.Let us name, above all, those whom this movement was born to serve: the indigent, the poorest among us. The African National Congress will fight to protect them, and more than to protect them, to develop them. Our policy for the indigent must never become a resting place. It must be a bridge out of poverty, a deliberate programme of human development built around the household, so that indigence is not a permanent feature of our national life but a condition we are steadily lifting our people out of. That is our undertaking and we will honour it.

We will go on building homes and making human settlements where our children can grow and thrive, places where a woman and a girl can walk without fear, where every street is lit, and where the overgrown grass and the weeds that hide danger are cut back so that our people are safe in the very places they live. These are not small things. A home, a title deed, a working street light, a cleared verge: these are the dignity of a people made real, and the African National Congress will not rest until every community in this country knows them.

The moment before us

On the question the country is asking, of coalitions and of who will govern where no party won outright, let us be clear and let us be measured. As we speak there are no formal talks under way. We expect that such discussions will begin soon, and the African National Congress will approach them in good faith. We will be open to arrangements that put people first and that stand squarely on our Constitution, with clear and honest priorities agreed in advance and with no secret carve-outs for the benefit of one party or another. Above all, our concern, and it should be the concern of every responsible party, is that there must be no disruption to the services that government is bound to provide, bound by the Constitution and bound by our common humanity. Water, electricity, refuse, safety and care for the vulnerable do not pause for politics, and we will not allow them to.

Guiding us will be the structures of our own movement. The National Executive Committee of the African National Congress will meet shortly in a Special Meeting to reflect on these elections and on their results, and to settle the position that will guide the work ahead. That work is simple to state and demanding to do: to hear our people and to respect them, to return to our communities and rebuild this movement from the branch upward, and to earn again, through service and not through slogans, the trust the people have lent to others.

To those who carried this campaign

The African National Congress owes its deepest thanks to its volunteers. Comrades, you walked in the heat and in the rain, door to door, week after week. You slept little. Many of you spent your own money on transport and on food to do work that nobody was going to thank you for. You sat at voting stations from before dawn until the last count was done, and you asked for nothing in return. This movement has no greater asset than you, and in a week in which we must be honest about our shortcomings, let us be equally honest about this: whatever this movement still holds in this country, it holds because of you.

Thank you.

We thank our Alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African National Civic Organisation, who stood with this movement through a difficult campaign. We thank the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa and our traditional leaders, who held their communities in peace. We thank the African National Congress Women’s League, the African National Congress Youth League, the African National Congress Veterans’ League and the uMkhonto we Sizwe Liberation War Veterans. We thank our student and youth formations, and all the motive forces of our revolution. And we thank the clergy of every denomination and faith, who prayed for this country, who counselled calm where tempers rose, and

who opened their doors as voting stations and as places of refuge. Yours is a service the nation seldom sees and should never take for granted.

We are the oldest liberation movement on this continent and we have carried this nation through darker passages than this one. We built this democracy. We will not abandon it and we will not fear its verdict. We will take our correction as a movement of the people must, with humility, with discipline and with hope.We thank all South Africans, we thank all who voted and we thank all who kept the peace. May we honour our dead by building

the country they did not live to see.

We thank you.

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