The IEC says it will not bend the rules for any political party.
The ANC has blamed its late submission of councillor candidates to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) on internal “vetting” processes.
The party is currently at loggerheads with the IEC after it failed to submit all its lists of councillors in at least three provinces, the most notable being the Eastern Cape. In a statement on Monday, the party said the IEC’s system had glitches that caused their candidates to be excluded.
However, the IEC has denied that its systems experienced glitches on 28 August and said political parties had two months to submit their lists before the submission deadline.
But speaking to Newzroom Afrika on Wednesday, ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu said that, as part of the renewal process, the party’s councillor candidates are going through stringent scrutiny before they are finally recommended to the IEC.
“The ANC undergoes and undertakes a vetting process which is very robust in terms of how we have improved our candidate selection process, and so, all of those processes, including getting the ID numbers of people and making sure that the room and the margin of error is minimised,” she said.
Bhengu admitted that the party had been uploading its candidates on the last day of submission, but she said the problem began when the final portion of its lists was being submitted.
“That was before 5 o’clock, so what we are discussing here, we are not discussing lack of compliance on the part of the African National Congress with meeting the timelines; we are talking about a batch that was kicked out, when in fact the rest of the candidate list had been uploaded on that very same day,” she said.
Bhengu said the ANC is requesting an investigation into the alleged malfunctioning of the IEC’s online system on 28 August.
“The request to the independent electoral commission is to consider all of those, our candidates who had already been captured in the IEC system with applicable accompanying documents that are required the second thing that we are really asking is to get to the bottom of why is it that the very last batch of the ANC list that contained candidate list some from parts of the Eastern Cape, one from a municipality in KwaZulu-Natal and one from a metropolitan municipality in the Free State Mangaung, for that to be rectified,” she said.
Meanwhile, IEC Chief Electoral Officer Sy Mamabolo insists that the commission will not bend its rules for any political party.
“The ANC requested confirmation that their candidates were not submitted in certain municipalities because they wanted to be sure that indeed that was the case, and the commission so confirmed. The commission has never entertained any possibility to open the system for any one party, and as our statement indicated yesterday, the commission does not have an intention even at this point to open the system,” he said.
Meanwhile, Bhengu said the ANC is not fighting with the IEC.
“That is why we hope that an engagement, a constructive engagement and an investigation whether there were technological failures that may not have been foreseen or anticipated or whether the reason for the malfunction may very well be other reasons, it does merit an investigation.”
