The 2021 Local Government Elections (LGEs) will be interesting considering the outcomes of both the 2016 (LGEs) and the 2019 General Elections (GEs), which proved that the political landscape of the country is in a continuous state of flux. With specific reference to the 2016 LGEs, political analysts and commentators stopped at nothing in considering them a watershed development in South African politics, granted that they were free and fair with no violence reported. As predicted by many, the outcome of the 2016 LGEs seemed to point to a changing political landscape, thereby suggesting that it is inevitable that South African politics will never be the same again. This article employs Hegel's thesis, antithesis and synthesis (Hegel, 2010 (1812)) to scrutinise the events following the 2016 LGEs as the annus horribilis of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). At that point in time, in various co