ANC Ordered to Open Its Books: What the Eastern Cape Court Battle Really Means

A South African court has ordered the African National Congress and its Secretary-General, Fikile Mbalula, to hand over sensitive membership data within 10 court days — and this is not the first time the party has been forced into this corner. It is, in fact, the fifth time this year alone that the ANC has lost a case in the Eastern Cape High Court against the same group of challengers.

What exactly did the court order?

Judge Avinash Govindjee of the KuGompo High Court issued a directive compelling the ANC and Mbalula to produce electronic membership-system records and branch attendance registers covering the Eastern Cape for both 2025 and 2026. The records must be submitted electronically through secure means determined by the court’s registrar.

To protect the sensitivity of the data, the information will not enter the public court file. Only the court itself and the legal representatives of the applicants will be able to access it. On top of that, the ANC was ordered to cover the applicants’ legal costs on a punitive Scale B basis — a signal that the court took the party’s conduct seriously.

Once the data is delivered, an ANC leader or staff member must sign an affidavit confirming that the membership information provided is complete and covers the entire Eastern Cape province. No shortcuts, no partial disclosures.

Who is pushing back against the ANC — and why?

The challenge comes from three ANC members: Lwazi Rotya, Sinethemba Mpande and Nompumelelo Mzotwa. They have been fighting the party through the courts over what they describe as deeply compromised branch processes ahead of a provincial elective conference — a conference they successfully interdicted earlier this year.

Their core allegations are serious. They claim that Branch General Meetings held in the lead-up to the provincial conference were riddled with manipulation, identity-document harvesting and outright fraudulent activity. In other words, they argue that the very grassroots democratic processes the ANC relies on to legitimise its leadership structures were being gamed.

This latest court application, heard on September 17 with the ruling delivered electronically on Wednesday, was an interlocutory move — a step within the broader legal battle — designed to compel the ANC to deliver on an undertaking it had already made and accepted during the main application. The trio wanted the so-called “raw data” the party had promised, and the court agreed they were entitled to it.

Why does this matter beyond one court case?

For young Africans watching political institutions operate, this case exposes something fundamental: internal party democracy is not automatic, and it does not police itself. The ANC’s Eastern Cape branch processes — the meetings, the registers, the membership rolls — are the foundation on which provincial leadership is built. If those foundations are manipulated, the leaders who emerge carry a legitimacy deficit from day one.

The fact that Rotya and his co-applicants have now beaten the ANC five times in the same court division within a single year tells its own story. It suggests a pattern of institutional resistance to transparency rather than isolated administrative error. Courts do not keep ruling against a party on the same issues by accident.

The broader political stakes are real. The Eastern Cape is one of the ANC’s historic strongholds, and a disputed provincial conference feeds directly into national power dynamics within the party. Who controls the Eastern Cape structures influences delegate counts, policy positions and ultimately the direction of one of the continent’s oldest liberation movements.

What happens next?

The ANC now has 10 court days to comply — a tight window that leaves little room for delay or legal manoeuvring. Failure to comply would place the party and Mbalula in contempt of court, a scenario that would deepen an already damaging narrative around the organisation’s relationship with accountability.

Once the raw data reaches the court, the applicants’ legal team will scrutinise it against the branch attendance records and membership rolls to determine whether the meetings that fed into the interdicted conference were legitimate. The findings could either confirm the allegations of fraud or clear the air — but either way, the ANC will have been forced to open its books in a way it clearly preferred to avoid.

For the youth watching this unfold, the lesson is straightforward: democratic accountability does not only happen at the ballot box. Sometimes it happens in a courtroom, pushed forward by ordinary party members who refused to accept that the rules simply did not apply to those in power.