REUTERS picSouth Africans queued in the winter cold on Wednesday to vote in local elections seen as a referendum on President Jacob Zuma’s scandal-plagued leadership and an economy forecast to stagnate this year.
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The economic hub of Johannesburg, the capital city of Pretoria and the coastal town of Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape Province (also known as Nelson Mandela Bay) are all predicted to be highly contested battlegrounds in the polls, African Business Magazine reported.
Vote tallies are expected to trickle in throughout the day on Thursday, but the final national results are not expected before Friday.
“Local elections are normally uninteresting”. There are over 61,000 candidates running in 283 municipalities from 200 political parties, Al Jazeera reported.
“If that is the case, the name Zuma will dominate the ANC’s national executive committee meeting after the elections”.
The IEC said most of the voting stations opened on time, and that voting went smoothly. The DA is also expected to hold on to power in Cape Town, and by a comfortable margin.
Should the ANC lose a substantial number of votes in tomorrow’s election, a lot of pressure will be exerted on President Jacob Zuma, according to two political analysts.
On coalition government: “During the campaign you fight and after you return back to being solid South African citizens – that’s what we must remember, we have preferences and we are allowed. but we still have the responsibility to build a nation and unite the nation”.
“But it’s interesting to note that it’s not just media organisations and official party sources that are shaping the discussion agenda, it is millions of ordinary people using their smartphones and social media platforms to share their opinions, comment on unfolding developments and even report breaking news to their followers”.
Problem The problem for the ANC is that the DA has proven in the Western Cape Province that it runs better municipalities than the ruling party.
Mmusi Maimane, a former preacher from Soweto who leaders the DA, said the ANC had abandoned his values, which only he could now be trusted to take forward.
Lawmakers of the Economic Freedom Fighters have disrupted parliamentary sessions several times to protest a scandal over state upgrades to Zuma’s private home.
“I think the ANC at this point is very divided, I think that their leader is a liability, everybody know he is a liability – I think the people are sick and exhausted of the corruption and nepotism that is a characteristic of the ANC.”- James Selfe, Democratic Alliance.
The EFF, which won six per cent of the vote in the 2014 general election, advocates land redistribution without compensation and the nationalisation of mines. “After 1994, it promised heaven on earth – we are still waiting”, Mlungiseleli Kwanini, 60, an unemployed casual labourer in Port Elizabeth, told AFP before the vote.
The ANC, the party of liberation hero Nelson Mandela, was a leading anti-apartheid movement for decades and helped defeat the apartheid system in 1994.
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Meanwhile, confidence in Zuma’s political judgement was eroded last December when he sacked respected finance minister Nhlanhla Nene at the expense of a little-known backbench MP – before drafting in Pravin Gordhan following an investor outcry.
