Dinga Sikwebu’s article in last week’s City Press (“SACP’s umms and ahhs: Holes in motivations to contest elections”, Sun 18 Jan 2026, https://www.news24.com/citypress/voices/dingwa-sikwebu-sacps-umms-and-ahhs-holes-in-motivations-to-contest-elections-20260117-1174) lands a necessary challenge: the SACP’s decision to contest the 2026 local government elections is politically significant, but it currently reads as a half-step — an “umming and ahhing” posture that may fail to inspire precisely the working-class constituencies the party claims to represent.

I agree with Sikwebu’s core instinct: this moment matters. Not because the SACP is likely to win councils, but because South Africa’s political crisis is also a crisis of working-class representation. The decline of the ANC’s legitimacy is not automatically the rise of the left. It is also the opening for demagogic “quick-fix” politics, for lumpen-patriarchal forms of coercion, and for a deeper social cynicism about collective action, especially electoral action.

If the SACP is serious, its electoral entry must become a political-educational project that helps rebuild popular power, not a narrow contest for council seats. It must put forward a coherent local state programme anchored in the lived crisis of municipalities and the structural political economy that produced it.

Municipal collapse is not abstract. It is where the social crisis becomes daily life. It is where austerity becomes a broken water pump, where “market logic” becomes prepaid electricity and disconnections, where tender capture becomes potholes and sewage, where state incapacity becomes gendered violence in unlit streets. This crisis is structural and systemic, not merely moral or managerial.

It is therefore not “small politics” when a party claims it will intervene in local government. It is a decisive terrain. Municipalities are not only service-delivery machines; they are sites of class struggle over public goods, land, infrastructure, jobs, and the social wage.

The question is whether the SACP will treat this as a real strategic turn, or as a symbolic assertion of independence while remaining entangled in the political logic of the ANC-led Alliance.

Sikwebu is right that credibility will not be built by slogans about “saving the NDR” or by claiming to be on the ballot “not against the ANC.” Ordinary people understand competition. If you field candidates “wall to wall”, you are contesting power whether you admit it or not.

But the deeper problem is not messaging alone. It is programme. What does the SACP actually propose as an alternative model of local government? This is the heart of Sikwebu’s challenge to the SACP.

The SACP provides a “cogent diagnosis” and identifies both institutional reforms and an electoral political programme — but Sikwebu presses the harder question: to what end do these reforms translate, strategically, toward socialist aims and a real alternative to neoliberal provisioning? That is the crux. If the party cannot answer this, it will not inspire the disillusioned, and it will not activate abstainers into collective action.

So what should the policy package look like? A serious policy package must name the enemy: commodification, corporatisation, and the user-pays local state. South Africa’s developmental local government is constitutionally implied but practically neoliberal: cost recovery, commercialisation, tariff dependence, outsourcing, tenderisation, and a corrosive politics of contractors and patronage. Municipalities designed for redistribution have been trapped in a business model that reproduces inequality.

The dominant municipal logic has been to treat service provision “like a business,” with the consequence being corporatisation and commodification. This is not a neutral technical choice; it undermines socio-economic rights, entrenches a two-tier system, and weakens democratic accountability.

Decommodification, in this framing, means reducing people’s reliance on markets for survival through a strengthened social wage—free or affordable basic services, progressive cross-subsidies, and public provision organised around social need rather than profit.

Therefore, if the SACP wants to be taken seriously, it must say plainly: we will fight the user-pays model; we will oppose outsourcing and tenderisation; and we will build a municipal agenda of public, democratic, developmental provision.

Anti-corruption cannot be reduced to policing a few bad officials. Tender corruption is structurally linked to outsourcing, commodification, and the hollowing out of public capacity.

A credible alternative must be based on a fundamental shift from “good governance” to democratic power: participation, social audits, and open councils. This includes:
•⁠ ⁠Institutionalised social audits and participatory monitoring (not PR exercises). This is already central to your FOMI framing: “social audits and implementation… deepening meaningful public participation.”
•⁠ ⁠People’s forums and assemblies linked to ward-level power mapping and real budget oversight.
•⁠ ⁠Open, transparent council and committee meetings, with public participation that exceeds the legal minimum, and with accessible documentation and reporting back.

This is not a liberal add-on. It is the material basis of rebuilding legitimacy and popular confidence.

Also critical is the need for a redesign of the constitutional architecture shaping local government because the system is hitting its “sell-by date”. Technocratic reforms — professionalisation, transparency, better financial management — are necessary but not sufficient because the “essence” of the crisis lies in the structural organisation of local government and the fiscal architecture that assumes municipalities can do their mandate on roughly a tenth of nationally raised revenue because they have tax-raising powers. This assumption collapses in poor municipalities with no taxable base.

This points to the need for a bolder agenda: not only fixing councils, but redesigning the local state — functions, finance, demarcation logic, intergovernmental relations, and the architecture of democratic participation. If the SACP is serious, it must engage the Local Government White Paper Review process and broader reform debates with a coherent programme, not merely campaign rhetoric.

Sikwebu is also right on the vanguardism trap – the focus should be on building a popular front, not an SACP-centric project. As Sikwebu says, taking a party decision first and then “consulting others” later reproduces the very politics of substitutionism that has weakened the left for decades.

The new conjuncture requires “new types” of broad fronts on key issues and a deeper engagement with what new Alliance politics would mean if the SACP is on the ballot—especially where popular left interests diverge from the ANC in and outside the state.

So the task is clear: build a municipal popular front rooted in community struggles—water, housing, electricity, sanitation, land, safety—and anchored in working-class organisation. A party campaign must be subordinated to that broader project, not the other way around.

The hard truth: the SACP will not get 1% — but that can be politically productive. The SACP is unlikely to secure meaningful council representation in 2026. But that should not be the measure of success. The measure should be whether this intervention becomes a cadre-building process, a programme-building process, and a credibility-building process in communities.

That means: local political education schools; ward-based policy platforms; alliances with civic formations and social movements; a serious organising line; sustained mass struggles that challenge ANC and DA run municipalities; and a public programme that people can express in their own language.

Ultimately, whatever the SACP does it must recognise that it does not have a future if it remains strategically oriented to the ANC. Sikwebu is correct that the SACP tries to have its cake and eat it: contest elections while insisting it is not challenging the ANC and simultaneously preserving the Alliance. But the ANC itself is drawing “lines in the sand” and insisting members campaign for ANC victory. The SACP cannot rebuild credibility while remaining politically subordinate to the very party that has been the central vehicle of neoliberal consolidation and municipal collapse. This is not about sectarian purity. It is about political clarity. Without decisively confronting the ANC question, the SACP’s electoral turn will remain ambiguous—and ambiguity does not build mass support.

The SACP’s entry into local elections could be historically useful, but only if it becomes a coherent popular project: decommodify services, rebuild public capacity, democratise councils and budgets, institutionalise social audits, and build a broad municipal popular front. Otherwise, it will be a small electoral episode that changes nothing.

The real work is not the ballot paper. The real work is rebuilding popular power in the neighbourhoods, on the streets, and in the workplaces—so that local government can be reclaimed as a public, democratic, developmental institution driven from below.

If the SACP wants to matter again, it must stop umming and ahhing and begin the harder task: building a radical municipalism that is not merely “in the council chamber,” but in the daily life of poor and working people, organised, undertaking transformative action through municipalities, and ready to govern through deep democracy from below.

Jara is a former SACP member, now with the Zabalaza Pathways Institute.