[WATCH Q&A] MAYORAL CANDIDATES: OFFICIALS WILL DECIDE We are not going to announce Mayoral candidates now, we are in the field and busy campaigning very hard. We have told South Africans who are the people we will be looking at post the elections as mayoral candidates. What we did not do is put a single candidate to the people. There is nothing wrong with people being ambitious but it starts with winning. The final decision will be taken by the officials no one else. #MTBPS2026

[WATCH] THE ENGINES OF OUR ECONOMY AND WHO THEY SERVE Fifth, let me speak about where this economy is made, because it tells a proud story. The wealth of this country is made, above all, in our great cities. Gauteng's three metros alone Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, the city region this movement built and leads produce more than a third of everything South Africa makes, and Johannesburg on its own produces close to a sixth of the nation's wealth. eThekwini, our home in KwaZulu-Natal, runs the busiest port on the African continent, the gateway through which the trade of a whole region flows. Mangaung, Nelson Mandela Bay and Buffalo City carry the economic heart of their provinces. These are the engines of our country, and this budget fuels them — the biggest share for local government in our history, and more money for the metros to keep moving. And here is the difference that matters, and it is the difference between this movement and those who would replace it. Where the African National Congress governs, we grow the city for the many we carry the services and the opportunity into the township and the informal settlement, and not only to the leafy suburb. Consider the one great city our opponents in the Democratic Alliance run. Cape Town grows, yes, it grows at the back of Brand South Africa through the road network SANRAL builds and Airports which ACSA build and manage, it is a collective effort and not of some special group but also ask the people of Khayelitsha, of Mitchells Plain, of Gugulethu, whether that growth has reached their streets, their sanitation and their safety the way it has reached the other side of the mountain. A city that grows for some is not the same as a country that grows for all, this budget deal with that too – it tempers with exclusion. The African National Congress does not build an economy for a postcard. We build it for the people — all of the people, in every street and every settlement. That is People First. #MTBPS2026