- Solomon Kekana stayed on as Operation Dudula’s Online Party Administrator, even though the party said he had been suspended and expelled.
- The party managed to regain access to the system on 27 August after getting a court order, but then had less than a day to finish its nominations.
- The dispute centred on whether the IEC could let Operation Dudula complete its outstanding nominations after the deadline had passed.
An Electoral Court judgment showed how Operation Dudula’s internal leadership dispute became a major problem for its preparations for the 2026 municipal elections.
The party wanted to contest the elections scheduled for 4 November but could not properly access the IEC’s online candidate nomination system. Solomon Kekana was still listed by the IEC as the party’s leader and Online Party Administrator, even though Operation Dudula said he had been suspended and expelled.
The system only allowed one Online Party Administrator for each registered political party. So Operation Dudula needed the IEC to update its records before it could use the system with a different administrator.
The party went to the IEC on 29 May and asked for its records to be corrected. The IEC refused to make the change without a court order, which meant Operation Dudula had to take the matter to the Electoral Court.
The court order came almost too late
Operation Dudula finally got an order removing Kekana as its online administrator on 27 August. The IEC immediately complied and updated its records.
But the deadline for submitting party lists and ward candidate nominations was 5pm on 28 August. That left Operation Dudula with less than a day to recover and finish a process already disrupted by the leadership dispute.
The judgment describes how the party then tried to make up for lost time. Representatives went to Election House on the morning of 28 August and tried to submit their documents by hand.
The final hours became a scramble
However, they were told that manual submissions could not be made at the IEC’s national office. So they asked for help with the online system, and an IEC official took them through the submission process in a training session that lasted about two hours.
Afterwards, the party’s representatives left Election House and went to their attorneys’ offices in Arcadia, Pretoria. They kept working on the outstanding nominations there, but still couldn’t complete everything before the deadline.
At 5pm, the online system logged them out while submissions were still in progress. The unfinished submissions included party lists for Polokwane Local Municipality, eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality, and the City of Cape Town, as well as some ward nominations for Tshwane and Johannesburg.
Operation Dudula asked for more time
Operation Dudula then asked the IEC for a chance to finish the outstanding submissions. The party argued that the IEC had the power to change the election timetable if it was needed for a free and fair election.
The IEC rejected the request and said the timetable applied to all parties. It also said there was no legal basis for giving Operation Dudula an individual extension after the deadline had passed.
The dispute then went before the Electoral Court. The question was whether the IEC had acted unlawfully by refusing to let Operation Dudula complete its outstanding nominations after the legal deadline.
Judge DH Zondi said the party had allowed its leadership dispute to disrupt its preparations and hadn’t acted with enough urgency. He called Operation Dudula “the author of its own misfortune” and noted that the party only received training on the electronic nomination system on the final day for submissions.
The Electoral Court dismissed the application
The Electoral Court ultimately dismissed Operation Dudula’s application. It found that the party had failed to comply with the statutory election timetable and that the IEC did not have the authority to accept late submissions.
There was no order as to costs.
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