The timeline of the Metsimaholo Local Municipality reads like a manual on the fragmentation of South African local governance. For more than two decades following the democratic transition, the African National Congress (ANC) governed the Sasolburg-headquartered municipality with comfortable, outright majorities.
However, the watershed 2016 local elections shattered that hegemony, introducing a chaotic era of hung councils, dissolved administrations, and compromise mayors from minority parties like the African Independent Congress (AIC).
As the municipality drifts further from its era of absolute ANC control, a critical question hangs over Sasolburg, Zamdela, Oranjeville and Deneysville: Can the ANC ever regain an outright majority in Metsimaholo?
Looking at the deep political undercurrents, structural shifts, and historical fractures in the region, the short answer is: highly unlikely. The era of single-party dominance in Metsimaholo is dead, and the ANC’s path back to 50%+1 is blocked by walls of its own making.
The ANC’s biggest obstacle to regaining a majority is that its traditional support base is no longer a monolith. The defining moment of this fracture occurred in November 2017, when the South African Communist Party (SACP) took the historic step of contesting elections independently for the first time since 1994.
By fielding its own candidates and subsequently installing Lindiwe Tshongwe as the country’s first SACP mayor, the communist party proved that the left-wing, working-class vote in Metsimaholo could be successfully peeled away from the ANC.
The deep wounds from the 2013 demarcation protests and the 2014 dismissal of hundreds of SAMWU-aligned municipal workers have never fully healed. In Metsimaholo, the Alliance is structurally fractured; as long as left-wing voters and organized labor feel alienated by the ANC’s local governance track record, those votes will continue to scatter to the SACP, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), or civic independent structures.
In the current council setup, power does not belong to the largest parties, but to the smallest. The fact that Jack Malindi of the AIC—a minority party with minimal seats—holds the Executive Mayor’s seat is a testament to how comfortable opposition parties have become with exploiting ANC desperation.
The ANC has grown content with “governing from the backseat” by taking the Speaker position and Mayoral Committee allocations while letting a compromise minority candidate take the public flak as mayor. This strategy may keep the ANC close to the levers of patronage, but it damages its brand as a decisive, leading party.
Voters watching this arrangement see a party that is willing to trade executive leadership for political survival, which does nothing to convince disgruntled residents to return to the ANC fold.
To win an outright majority, the ANC would need to systematically claw back seats from both the right and the left. However, the political landscape in Metsimaholo has professionalized its opposition: the EFF has solidified its role as a permanent disruptor and a necessary voting bloc, capturing a firm slice of the youth and unemployed vote.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) and Freedom Front Plus (FF+) maintain a highly disciplined, reliable voter turnout in Sasolburg’s urban and suburban suburbs.
For the ANC to achieve a majority, it would require a massive swing of voters abandoning both the EFF and the DA simultaneously—an electoral phenomenon that simply does not align with current South African political trajectories.
The ANC’s historical majority in Metsimaholo was built on the assumption that it was the sole vehicle for black working-class aspirations in the Free State’s industrial heartland. That assumption was permanently dismantled between 2013 and 2017.
Can the ANC remain in power in Metsimaholo? Yes, but only by renting power through volatile, expensive, and fragile coalitions. The path to an outright, absolute majority is closed.
For the ANC, the future in Metsimaholo is not about regaining total control; it is about learning how to survive in the turbulent, multi-party waters they helped create.
Thys Khiba is the Editor-in-chief for City Report.
