a democratic license we should allow citizens to have this blank option on our ballot papers?

Hi, John, and hi to your listeners.

Look, the thing about having a none of the above option is, I guess the question is, what do you want to do with it? As a protest vote, as a way of signaling the unhappiness of voters with the options that are available to them, It is often considered a better option than abstention, which is what we've seen in South Africa.

I mean, we had around 11.5 million registered voters.

So 11.5 million of the 27.7 or so registered voters in the previous elections in 2024 didn't turn out to vote.

And there were 23 million of eligible voters, so people over the age of 18, that didn't vote in the last election.

And so certainly, as a way of registering and happiness with the options, and still participating in the electoral system and in the vote, I think that having a man of the above option would be a better option to abstention.

It's kind of democratic to give them a right to say so, I think.

I asked Thembile to explain the steps between an agreed plan, an allocated budget, and getting the work done.

done.I think that an important thing to start with is that, you know, in our system and in the framework that's built into the Municipal Finance Management Act, the MFMA, is that integrated planning processes, so what we call the IDP process, the integrated development plan process, and the budgeting process are meant to be complementary.

So whatever is in the annual budget is meant to reflect the priorities, the plans, the projects that a community in a given municipality has decided on in their IDP.

And so the five-year IDP that's decided at the beginning of an electoral term, and then the reviews of the IDPs that are done every year, those are all supposed to be reflected in then the budget because the IDP is created, there's a financial plan that's meant to go with that IDP, and then the annual budget is basically the annual allocation of what is in the financial plan about what are the projects that are meant to be pursued in a particular municipality in any given year.

And so, you know, but you're meant to go then from this planning process, that is the planning and the budgeting, and then towards implementation.

And so the allocations that have been set out in the budget for both the operational expenditure and the capital expenditure for whatever the projects are meant to be in each department, that is where at departmental level, those departmental budgets are meant to then govern how the implementation happens.

And then there's meant to be an oversight process of monitoring the expenditure and the performance, and then developing and checking the reports.

So I wonder now that there's a GNU, how you think that's going to impact what happens in the election where we're expecting a lot of coalitions, especially in the major metropolitan municipalities?

So I think the point that you're making about coalition government starting really at local level is a really important one.

I think it's one that we don't sort of think about enough as we contextualize coalitions even nationally.

You know, the research that MISTRA, the Mapungube Institute, has done shows that in 2016, the first election where we had a big uptick of hung municipalities and therefore coalition governments.

There were 27 hung municipalities after the 2016 election.

There were 70 after the 2021 election.

And we expect that that number is going to be even larger in 2026.

So I'll start with you, Sté, on the party manifestos.