Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Picture the scene: a packed media briefing room in Durban, ANC officials sitting upright and composed, fielding questions about the woman who once beat them at their own game. Zandile Gumede — former mayor, corruption accused, and now the newest face of Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) — had just been paraded before cheering supporters as the party’s KwaZulu-Natal deputy convener. The ANC’s response? Cool, almost theatrical indifference. But beneath the calm, the political ground in eThekwini is shifting in ways that matter deeply for the city’s future — and for the young people who live in it.
Durban’s mayoral chain has been worn by ANC-aligned figures since 1996. That’s nearly three decades of unbroken dominance over one of South Africa’s most economically vital metros, a city of roughly four million people where youth unemployment sits stubbornly high and service delivery failures have become a running wound. The November 2026 local government elections represent a genuine inflection point, and the question of who controls eThekwini is far from settled. Gumede’s defection to the MKP has thrown that question wide open, whether the ANC wants to admit it or not.
The ANC’s eThekwini task team coordinator, Thanduxolo Sabelo, wasted no time labelling Gumede “politically dormant” — a figure who had been lying idle for seven years after the party placed her on step-aside in 2019. The step-aside rule, which forces members facing criminal charges to vacate their positions, was triggered after Gumede’s arrest in May 2019 in connection with the R320 million Durban Solid Waste tender corruption scandal. She was removed as mayor in August of that year, stripped of her political powers, and yet — and this is the part the ANC finds awkward to explain — she remained wildly popular among grassroots structures, who showed up to court in numbers to cheer her on. At the 2022 eThekwini ANC regional conference, she was re-elected to the regional leadership, defeating the very slate that now stands before cameras insisting she poses no threat.
That irony is impossible to ignore. Regional convener Thabani Nyawose, who lost to Gumede at that 2022 Durban ICC conference, stood at the briefing and said flatly that the ANC does “not feel threatened” by her departure. His colleague Sabelo echoed the sentiment. Both men were on the losing side in 2022. Both are now publicly dismissing the woman who beat them as a non-factor. It takes a particular kind of political confidence — or political theatre — to pull that off with a straight face.
ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula offered perhaps the most candid framing from the party’s national leadership, acknowledging that the ANC had known for some time that the MKP intended to recruit Gumede as “the face of eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality.” His tone was measured, almost philosophical. “We are not at war with Zandile. She has chosen her path, which is Jacob Zuma. It is fine. For us, it is not really a shock,” Mbalula told journalists. That admission — that this was anticipated, expected, and absorbed — is either a sign of genuine organisational maturity or a masterclass in managing optics. Possibly both.
What makes Gumede’s move genuinely significant is not her individual political record, which is complicated at best given that her corruption trial is still ongoing. What matters is the loyal support base she built across eThekwini’s ward structures — exactly the kind of community-level network that decides local elections, ward by ward, voting district by voting district. The MKP, which burst onto the national scene with seismic force in the May 2024 general elections, is now trying to translate that momentum into municipal power, and Gumede is their chosen vehicle for doing so in a metro that the ANC has held for thirty years. MKP Secretary-General Sibonelo Nomvalo’s introduction of Gumede drew some of the loudest cheers of the event. That crowd reaction tells its own story.
The ANC, for its part, is pointing to organisational groundwork as its real defence. Nyawose cited established structures across all 112 wards in eThekwini, with volunteers deployed in every voting district. An unnamed ANC activist went further, arguing that Gumede had already been isolated within the party’s leadership circles due to her legal troubles, and that her departure “removed the burden from the ANC.” The party also announced the expulsion of Ward 8 councillor Marco Mbambo, whom it accused of being a “sleeper agent and spy” for the Democratic Alliance — a dramatic claim that signals just how paranoid and high-stakes the internal atmosphere has become as elections approach.
For young people in eThekwini — the ones navigating crumbling infrastructure, unreliable water supply, and a job market that keeps saying no — the political chess match between the ANC and the MKP is not an abstraction. It is a direct question about who will actually govern their city, and whether the next administration will be defined by accountability or by the same patterns of patronage and corruption that have hollowed out service delivery for years. Gumede herself remains on trial. The ANC that is now calling her dormant once re-elected her despite those charges. The MKP that is now celebrating her appointment is led by a man who avoided his own fraud and corruption trial by winning a political battle. None of this is clean. The real question, heading into 2026, is whether eThekwini’s voters — especially its youngest ones — will demand something different, or whether the familiar names and familiar networks will once again carry the day.
