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The ANC has spent months trying to raise the bar for the people it wants to send into South Africa’s municipalities. The party introduced stricter candidate-selection rules ahead of the 4 November local government elections, including a matric requirement for ordinary councillor candidates. Candidates without matric were recently told they would need to commit to obtaining a matric certificate or an accredited NQF Level 4 qualification within 12 months of becoming councillors.

As South Africa’s two biggest political parties, the ANC and the DA, continue to implore voters to cast a vote that will end coalitions in local government, Build One South Africa (Bosa) leader Mmusi Maimane has a different view: coalitions, he says, are here to stay.

If you pay your Johannesburg municipal bill every month, you probably have a reasonable expectation: the money should help keep the city running. Yet residents still deal with broken roads, unreliable water, failing infrastructure, and other basic service problems. This is not because Johannesburg has no money coming in. The bigger problem is how much money the city actually collects, how it plans around that money and where its cash goes once it arrives.

Hi there. 🙋🏾‍♀️ If someone forwarded you this email, hi! You clearly have friends with excellent taste. You can get The Wrap delivered straight to you every week. Go to explain.co.za/subscribe to sign up or share with someone who needs it. This week, South African news gave us election admin chaos, a corruption trial involving a suspicious wig, and the uncomfortable reminder that we are all getting older. Quite a range.

The ANC is taking the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) to court over disputed candidate lists for November’s local government elections, but the real story is the once mighty party’s decline. As we told you last week, the dispute centres on the events of 28 August. That Friday, with just half an hour left before the 17:00 deadline the ANC said its administrators were logged out of the IEC’s online nomination system. Twice, apparently.

South Africa, along with the rest of the continent, has spent years being told its greatest demographic superpower is its young population. We have millions of young people and a growing workforce. But according to recent projections, 2027 could be an important turning point, when the proportion of South Africans aged 65 and older passes the threshold the UN uses to describe a population as “old”.

Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula’s corruption trial has produced the kind of evidence list that sounds less like a court case and more like someone emptied a particularly mysterious handbag onto the table: a wig, impepho, snuff and padkos — all alleged code for cash, according to prosecutors. Now, in a turn of events straight out of a courtroom drama with a surprisingly large props department, Mapisa-Nqakula is finally getting to explain it all.

Each weekday morning, Thapelo Machubo drops his wife Alice off at work before continuing on to his own office. At the end of the day he collects her and they head home together. This a relatively new arrangement for the couple, who live in Witfield, Boksburg. They previously owned two cars, a Toyota Corolla Cross 2020 and a Suzuki Ertiga 2019. But petrol kept becoming more expensive. Their vehicle insurance premiums rose. Both cars required maintenance, occasionally at the same time.

Tinyiko Chauke doesn’t mince her words when talking about mental health in South Africa: “We are not living in a mentally well country.” It’s a grim assessment, and one that Chauke, a social worker and researcher, is well-placed to make. She works in LifeLine South Africa’s Specialised Health & Social Services Unit, which operates the 24-hour national trauma and crisis line.

When Lindy* bought her son a smartphone two years ago, she thought she was giving him a thoughtful birthday present. She was busy with life and did not think much about checking his browser history or asking what was keeping him glued to his screen. Then, during the school holidays, her mother caught Lindy’s 12-year-old son watching pornography. “It was the shock of my life,” Lindy told /explain/. The discovery meant having a conversation about sex and pornography much earlier than she had expected.