By Friday afternoon, with 98 percent of results counted, the ANC had won about 54 percent of the vote.
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On Friday morning, it conceded defeat to the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) party in Port Elizabeth, an industrial city that was a key battleground of Wednesday’s election.
When it realised power was slipping away from its hands in a metro named after its iconic leader and former president, the late Nelson Mandela, the ANC quickly moved in to try and quell the dissent, but whether that was enough to douse the fires … only the results of the elections will tell.
Twenty-two years since the party came to power, South Africans used the local government elections to warn the ANC that its historic achievement of overturning the apartheid system no longer guaranteed it the right to govern.
The Democratic Alliance angered the ANC last month by declaring that it was the only party that could realize Mandela’s dream of a “prosperous, united and non-racial South Africa”. More than 5.6 million people – 26.6 percent of the country’s work force – are unemployed.
“It is clear that South African voters have identified strongly with the DA”.
The results remained too close to call in the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, and the Tshwane metropolitan area around the capital, Pretoria. In Alexandra, a township in Johannesburg where the ANC’s beloved leader Mandela once lived, black voters who had supported the party for years said they had finally given up and wanted to see whether another group could do better.
In Marikana, the EFF is leading ward 32 of the Rustenburg local municipality with 42,79%, followed by the ANC with 36,69% while the DA was third with 14,51%.
The local elections are being seen as an indication of the mid-term popularity of President Zuma. The DA has poured significant resources into the battle for such areas, targeting councils and mayoral seats in a bid to strengthen its influence and governing credibility ahead of the 2019 general election.
Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters – a radical left-wing party dedicated to forced expropriation of white farms and public ownership of the mines – is looking to boost its appeal among poor rural voters.
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With 93 percent of the nationwide vote counted, final results were due out later Friday for Johannesburg and Pretoria. The ruling ANC government has been hit by a string of corruption scandals, most notably the $20m funneled into upgrading President Jacob Zuma’s personal home in Nkandla.
