Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has vowed that the Gauteng provincial cabinet will be announced tonight. Lesufi revealed this during a media briefing this afternoon at Luthuli House. Lesufi, who is the only Premier without an executive council, has postponed the announcement of his cabinet twice already.

The Premier said they have received the mandate to discuss with all the interested political parties. "We are communicating with the executive this evening, and this time it won't be postponed. We are working with all the political parties, which include the MK and EFF. All political parties have indicated exactly where they want to be placed. We might not have reached 50%, but we still got the most votes,' he said. He added that despite the abrupt postponements, whatever it was that was decided upon was a directive from the national leadership. "I want to highlight to you a bit how we ran our discussions. We waited for the national leaders to engage with a certain party to join the Government of National Unity, and then we engaged with those parties on a provincial level. At all levels of negotiations, we were in sync with the national leadership because there was a tendency to labelling us as rebels. Even with the postponements of the announcement and deadlocks in meetings, the national leadership was spearheading those negotiations, "he said.

Yesterday, the DA confirmed that they had reached a deadlock with the ANC in Gauteng during their negotiations. The party's federal chair, Hellen Zille, said that out of the eleven provincial cabinet posts, including the premier in Gauteng, the ANC wanted to give the DA three posts. "What we were proposing was five for the ANC, four for us, and one for the IFP concerning the proportionality clause, the inclusivity clause, and reflecting the will of the voters clause. That could have been fair,' Zille said. ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said that they were unable to accede to the DA's latest proposals. "As we have indicated throughout the negotiations, the DA is not the only party we are negotiating with on the setting up of the Gauteng Government of Provincial Unity. Due to our commitment to a speedy resolution of the impasse and our good faith in these discussions, we wrote a letter to the DA this morning to ask that we return to the negotiation table and not declare a deadlock,' Mbalula said.