The 2016 municipal elections kicked off on Wednesday, with polling stations, except for a very few, around the country officially opened.
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Results from South Africa’s fiercely contested local government elections could deliver a setback to the African National Congress (ANC), with early municipal results indicating that the party is losing support.
President Zuma’s office has urged voters to take part in peaceful municipal elections.
The ANC has won more than 60 percent of the vote at every election since Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the country’s first black president in 1994.
Ahead of the August local elections, The Africa Report organised a survey to take the temperature of South Africans’ attitudes to a range of political and economic issues.
The main opposition DA won control of five councils, getting 412 seats after securing more than three million votes.
Anger is also rising in a country where one in four people are unemployed and the central bank expects zero growth this year.
Some senior officials of the party have asked the South African President to step aside, as a result of the scandal and the weak economy.
Zuma has said he would repay some of the funds spent on his home and rejected criticism of his conduct.
Tens of thousands of South Africans braved winter weather on Wednesday to head to the polls and elect local government representatives in a tightly contested race.
“I can’t leave the ANC, no matter what”, said Daisy Mojanaga, who cast her ballot at Orlando West. The 69-year-old informal trader added that she owes everything to the ANC. “Nevermind it doesn’t do nothing, but I love them”.
Opposition parties hope to make big gains against the ruling party in Johannesburg; Tshwane, the greater metropolitan area of the capital, Pretoria; and Nelson Mandela Bay, a municipality on the east coast.
Beyond the loss of financial and political power, a defeat at the polls would be a profound psychological shock to many in the party, who believe that its leadership of the decades-long struggle against apartheid has given it a permanent mandate to rule.
Zuma, who is due to vote in Nkandla in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province later Wednesday morning, has come under pressure to quit since the nation’s top court ruled in March that he violated the constitution by refusing to repay taxpayer money spent on upgrading his private home.
In December, he was widely criticized for changing his finance minister twice in a week, sending the rand plummeting and alarming investors.
Its MPs’ spirited protests against Mr Zuma in parliament, the broadening of its leftist policy agenda and the perception in some quarters that the Democratic Alliance is a party for whites has seen it attract a growing number of middle-class black South Africans.
Opinion polls now put the opposition Democratic Alliance and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) ahead of the ANC in major cities like Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Port Elizabeth.
With about two-thirds of the vote counted, the ANC led in the national count with 53 percent at 1144 GMT, against 28 percent for the DA and 7 percent for the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters. A succession of graft scandals implicating President Jacob Zuma has also fueled discontent.
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“The ANC has turned its back on everything Nelson Mandela fought for”, he says, claiming that his party best represents Mandela’s non-racial vision for South Africa.
