Thami Ka Plaatjie rejoined the Pan Africanist Congress on Monday, more than two decades after the party expelled him, and walked straight into its most prominent electoral role: mayoral candidate for Johannesburg.
The announcement came during a media briefing at which the PAC unveiled candidates for several major metropolitan areas across the country. Ka Plaatjie’s return was the centrepiece. Expelled in 2003, he had spent the intervening years inside the African National Congress and, later, in government service as chief adviser for Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation under former minister Lindiwe Sisulu. He also previously served as the PAC’s own secretary-general, and authored a book on Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the party’s founding member and first president.
His political biography, in other words, runs through the very institutions the PAC now positions itself against.
At the time of the briefing, Ka Plaatjie was travelling to Robert Sobukwe, the town formerly known as Graaff-Reinet, where Sobukwe’s grave had been vandalized. The incident cast a shadow over the day’s proceedings, a reminder that the party’s historical symbols remain contested ground.
Meanwhile, the rest of the candidate slate filled out the PAC’s metropolitan ambitions. Victor Serakalala, the party’s deputy president, will contest the mayoral race in Ekurhuleni. APA Pooe, secretary-general, has been named the candidate for Emfuleni. Mbuyiselo Kantsu, the national organiser, will run for the mayoral seat in Sedibeng municipality. The breadth of the announcements signals a deliberate effort to compete across multiple jurisdictions at once, not simply to field a name in Johannesburg and call it a campaign.
Pooe set the tone for the party’s electoral message. He framed the campaign as a direct challenge to what he described as an era of neglect, corruption, political patronage, and arrogance. The PAC, he said, intends to disrupt that pattern.
He also described months of sustained preparation. The party has built what he called an extensive programme to rebuild its election machinery, including a consolidated national election strategy and provincial, regional, and municipal war rooms designed to coordinate campaign efforts on the ground.
The mobilization effort reaches beyond logistics. Pooe said the PAC has been organizing communities around four core themes: land, dignity, accountability, and dependable local government. That framing anchors the party’s appeal to material concerns and governance performance rather than to historical identity alone, a notable shift in emphasis for a party whose public profile has long rested on its liberation-era legacy.
Ka Plaatjie’s elevation to the Johannesburg candidacy, after expulsion and years away, suggests the PAC is trying to reconcile internal divisions and consolidate experienced leadership around a single electoral project. Whether that project can translate months of war-room preparation into actual votes in Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, and beyond is the question the local elections will answer.