The AM Check-in | Your top 3 reads today

The ANC has unveiled its 2026 local government elections manifesto anchored by a plan of action in six key areas as its selling point.

These include the provision of quality services and infrastructure, driving investment and job creation, ensuring safe, clean and healthy communities, ensuring there are sustainable and people-centred municipal finances, ensuring there is accountable local government and community participation.

These plans are what will guide the ANC should South Africans buy into its promises and hand the party outright majorities in the 257 municipalities across the country.

The Emfuleni local municipality is so broke that it has failed to settle a debt of just R580 owed to a tyre repair company for the past six months.

And a company that supplies it with grass-cutting equipment has been waiting for more than six months for it to settle its R1,500 bill, while a funeral parlour has been waiting to be paid for paupers’ burials it did almost a year ago.

These unpaid debts owed by the troubled municipality in the south of Joburg were revealed by Gauteng finance MEC Nkululeko Dunga in the legislature earlier this month.

For as long as they can remember, Ayanda and Anele Mthembu have done everything together.

The twins grew up in KwaMashu, Durban, sharing the same classroom, wearing similar clothes, enjoying the same sports and dreaming the same dreams for the future.

Today, based in Cape Town, that bond has taken them from township community swimming pools to the depths of the ocean as navy divers.