South African President Cyril Ramaphosa moved to defuse tensions sparked by his warning that the African National Congress (ANC) risks losing voter support unless it learns from a key political rival.

“Maybe you can say it got lost in translation. In the end we must all learn from each other,” he told the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in an interview on Thursday. “I should have talked about the full equation.”

Ramaphosa earlier in the week suggested that his colleagues learn lessons from better-run municipalities led by the Democratic Alliance (DA), the second largest party in a coalition government formed by the ANC after it lost its outright majority in last year’s elections.

He is navigating mounting challenges, including growing public frustration over poor service delivery, which he cautioned could cost the ANC in the 2026 municipal elections, and urged his colleagues to do better.

“We need to ask ourselves what is it that they are doing that is better than what we are doing. And there is nothing wrong with us saying we want to go and see what Cape Town is doing,” he said Monday, referring to the municipality run by the DA. “We need to be moving up the ladder at being good at what we do. We cannot stay forever at the bottom. It hurts me deeply.”

That unusual public candor drew widespread criticism, including from quarters of the ANC, for providing ammunition to the party’s chief rival.

DA leader John Steenhuisen was quick to seek political capital from the concession, claiming in a statement earlier on Thursday that “Ramaphosa in his capacity as ANC president, acknowledged publicly that where the DA governs, it delivers.”

The President, in his interview on Thursday, said he should have pointed to the progress made in transformation that is visible in municipalities run by the ANC, while clean audits of DA-run councils “does not mean clean streets.”

“There must be compliance,” he said. “There must also be transformation, improvement of the lives of our people.”