Party logos belong to the parties and are shown for identification only. Ukweli is not affiliated with any party.
This analysis covers the DA manifesto only. Ukweli assesses every party’s manifesto on the same terms. Other parties’ manifestos will be added as they are obtained.
Manifesto documents are sourced directly from party publications; Ukweli does not editorially select which parties to include or exclude.
Eight pages of the DA manifesto (pages 2, 6, 19, 25, 31, 33, 41 and 49) are photographs with no readable text. Ukweli could not read them, so they are not part of this analysis.
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Summary of findings
Ukweli read the DA’s 2026 local government manifesto and identified 244 separate promises. 180 have been assessed against the Constitution. Ukweli could not assess the other 64; the reasons are set out below.
Of the 180 assessed promises:
- 58 are about services a municipality is responsible for delivering.
- 50 are about how the council runs itself: its money, staff, decisions and how it answers to residents.
- 5 are shared with other spheres of government.
- 39 are outside municipal powers. No council can deliver them, whoever wins.
- 28 are commitments about the party's own conduct, not the council's.
Ukweli also compared the 113 promises a council can act on with the DA’s 2021 local government manifesto. For 4 of them it found a matching 2021 passage, shown on the promise’s card. For the rest it found none; that does not prove nothing was said.
Ukweli gives no overall score or grade to a manifesto. Each promise is assessed on its own, and the detail follows below.
The detail
Why only 180 of 244 promises are assessed
Ukweli reads every promise three separate times using an AI model, and checks each answer against the text of the Constitution. A verdict is published only when all three readings agree and every check passes. Where that did not happen, Ukweli publishes no verdict rather than a wrong one. These are the reasons the other 64 were not assessed. Click a reason to read more:
None of these reasons is a finding about a promise or about the party. Each describes a limit of Ukweli’s method. Ukweli may re-check these promises later.