This election should involve voters asking harder questions of everyone seeking public office and the political parties.
Who are they sending into council?
What skills and governance experience do they bring?
What will they do differently?
What measurable results are they prepared to be held accountable for?
When you enter the voting booth in Nelson Mandela Bay, two ballot papers will be placed before you.
Two crosses, and two questions to consider.
On the ward ballot, where the question is: Who am I voting for?
On the proportional representation, or PR, ballot, the question becomes: What am I voting for?
And before making either mark, there is a third question worth asking: Why?
That is where intelligent voting begins.
This election takes place against the reality of a metro facing serious challenges.
Residents experience these challenges in different ways: water interruptions and leaks, electricity problems, deteriorating roads, waste and sanitation concerns, unemployment and the frustration of waiting for municipal problems to be resolved.
Behind these visible problems are deeper institutional challenges.
The Nelson Mandela Bay Civil Society Rebuild Plan identifies three interconnected problems: governance instability, technical and operational failure, and financial weakness.
Put more simply: Can the city make decisions and maintain stable leadership?
Can it get the work done? And can it manage its finances well enough to sustain the services residents depend upon?
These questions should matter to voters.
The auditor-general's (AG) most recent assessment reports that the metro ended the 2024/2025 financial year in a deficit.
The AG continues to highlight accountability, procurement, infrastructure-investment and financial management concerns across metropolitan municipalities.
So how should an ordinary voter think about the two ballots?
In a metropolitan municipality, your ward ballot is a vote for a candidate, which is separate from the PR ballot.
Examine the individual asking to represent your community, and not the party.
Do they know the ward? Have they been accessible?
Do they understand the concerns of the community?
Can they communicate those concerns effectively in council?
Do they understand how municipal government works?
Will they report back to residents?
A ward councillor does not personally repair the pothole, replace the water pipe or fix the electricity network.
Municipal professionals and contractors perform those functions.
The councillor's responsibility is representation, governance and oversight.
The second ballot asks you to vote for a political party for proportional representation.
The constitution provides for municipal government combining ward representation with proportional representation from party lists.
This ballot deserves its own consideration.
What does the party offer Nelson Mandela Bay?
What has it demonstrated through its record, where applicable?
What does it propose to do about the metro's governance, finances, infrastructure and service-delivery challenges?
And importantly: who is the party preparing to send to council?
PR councillors do not need to be engineers, accountants or town planners.
Those are tasks for professional administrators.
But councillors must know how to govern the council.
A councillor exercising oversight over electricity should be able to understand the budget, examine performance targets, interrogate reports, and hold the administration accountable for corrective action.
That raises another question for political parties: What standard did they use when selecting their PR candidates?
Were candidates considered only for their political standing, or also for their ability to exercise governance, financial and performance oversight?
You are not bound to vote for the same party twice.
This is perhaps one of the most important things for voters to understand.
The two ballots are separate. Metro voters vote once for a ward candidate and separately for a political party on the PR ballot.
You may conclude that the same political party deserves both of your votes.
Another voter may prefer a ward candidate from one party and make a different choice on the PR ballot.
Both are legitimate exercises of the voter's choice.
The point is not to abandon political loyalty.
The point is to avoid unexamined choice.
Ask what evidence supports each decision.
Nelson Mandela Bay's problems were not created in a day, and no single election can magically solve them.
But elections determine who receives the responsibility to confront them.
So before making your crosses, remember: Ward: Who are you voting for?
PR: What are you voting for?
And finally: Why have you made those choices?
If your answer is informed by evidence, accountability, competence and your own assessment of what Nelson Mandela Bay needs, then whatever choices you freely make, you have made your vote count.
Apostle Neville Goldman: senior pastor Ebenezer Centre and deputy chair Nelson Mandela Bay Civil Society Forum