In recent days, Mbalula has maintained that the ANC did not miss the submission deadline and that the party uploaded “one hundred percent” of its candidates list via the IEC’s Online Candidate Nomination System by 17:00 on 28 August.
However, about 150 of the ANC’s 10,000 candidates were not finally submitted despite being captured on OCNS.
“The difficulty emerged in the closing hours of the window and was reported to the Commission as it arose,” said Mbalula.
“The ANC is not asking the Commission to condone a late nomination. We only ask that the Commission recognise and process what its own system received and stored before the deadline, rather than treat it as never having been submitted because of technical failures that prevented the final confirmation.”
While Mbalula appeared to blame “technical failures” in the IEC system, Gungubele squarely blamed the ANC leadership.
“The failure to submit municipalities and set of candidates to the IEC is a scandalous incident that cannot be joked about,” he wrote on X on Friday.
“As leadership, if we cannot be embarrassed by this, we aren’t worth the idea.”
According to the IEC, a total of 2,274 candidates from 45 political parties were captured on OCNS but not finally submitted.
“The Commission’s position is that, in practical terms, these potential candidates have not been submitted to the Commission and therefore are not in contention for this election,” it said.