Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. However, the ruling party was neck and neck with the DA in key metros of Tshwane and Johannesburg in Gauteng.
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The parties said they were not anxious by the slower pace of the vote counting process in Gauteng as they believed the IEC was taking “extra care” in the province due to the highly contested nature of the ballot.
We spoke to Sithembile Mbete, from the political sciences department at the University of Pretoria, who said what’s happened in Nelson Mandela Bay is not so much the DA winning but the ANC losing against itself.
With 100% of voting districts declared, the Democratic Alliance (DA) has clinched the Nelson Mandela Bay metro with 46.71% of the votes.
The first victory the DA claimed was the Nelson Mandela Bay area, named after the revered former president and once home to other heroes of the anti-apartheid movement.
“The people of the Eastern Cape and South Africa have realised they have power in their hands”, he said.
“The ANC is at a crossroads of either renewing itself through deep introspection or literally speeding the process of its decline”, he said in an interview in Pretoria.
Zuma’s office said Saturday that he would attend the announcement of the final election results.
“We are a party that’s not going away from the body politic of this country”, Ramaphosa said. It will need to form coalitions to take power in these areas.
In Johannesburg, with 71% votes counted, the ANC stood at 45.06% and the DA at 41.48%. “The message is clear, the writing is on the wall and 2019 is going to be a serious challenge for the whole party”, he said.
“The only people in the metro staff administration who will be subjected to direct scrutiny with potential negative consequences will be those implicated in corruption and found guilty of impropriety in this regard, and those who have been appointed irregularly‚” said Trollip. A more radical opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, contested the local elections for the first time and received 8 percent of the vote nationwide after promising measures it says will help the poor.
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The DA provincial leader said he had already talked to the UDM’s Mongameli Bobani in the region informally and would formalise the talks on Friday.
