On 2 February 1990, State President Frederik Willem (FW) de Klerk announced in parliament the unbanning of the ANC and other political organisations. He also proclaimed that the government had taken a decision finally to release Nelson Mandela from prison. Not long afterwards, the ANC and the government embarked on serious and open talks about the future of South Africa. In early May a high-powered delegation of the ANC, including Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Thabo Mbeki, met the government delegation at Groote Schuur, Cape Town. After three days of talks, the two delegations adopted the Groote Schuur Minute, binding the ANC and the government to a peaceful proscess of negotiations and obliging the government to lift the state of emergency.

At the local level, political activists continued to mobilise and exert pressure on government-created structures such as town councils. In Kroonstad, despite the heavy-handed response by the police in the mid-1980s, the residents of Maokeng, led by the Maokeng Democratic Crisis Committee, protested rent increases, boycotted shops in town and called for the dissolution of the City Council of Maokeng. The residents of Brentpark also took to the streets, protesting police aggression.

This revival of political protests and mobilisation was, however, disrupted by the outbreak of political violence between the Three Million Gang – aided by some of the councillors, the South African Police and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) – and the ‘community’, led by self-defence units aligned with the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL). After two years of intense fighting the Three Million Gang was finally defeated and the situation returned to normal. Political mobilisation gained momentum once more during the period leading to the first national, non-racial and democratic elections. The Kroonstad branch of the South African National Civic Association (Sanco) helped the ANC to mobilise, and turned its supporters into members.

But cracks began to show in the relationship between the ANC and the Kroonstad branch of Sanco during the campaign for the local government elections to be held towards the end of 1995. Some of the senior members of Sanco in Kroonstad, who were also in the leadership of the ANC Kroonstad branch, accused the ANC's provincial leadership of total disregard after it had failed adequately to consult when compiling the candidate list for the elections.