South Africans are heading to the polls to vote in the most significant municipal elections of the ANC’s twenty-two years in power.
Advertisement
“We know it’s a tight race but I can assure you that we will emerge victorious in Tshwane (Pretoria), we will emerge victorious in Johannesburg”, Jackson Mthembu, ANC chief whip in parliament, told reporters, striking an upbeat tone.
In the midst of a stagnant economy and widespread corruption, millions of South Africans took to the polls Wednesday in what many are calling the most important vote since Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994.
Senzo Makhubela, a 32-year-old security guard, said the ANC needed to build more houses and do more to develop areas like Diepsloot, the shantytown where he lives north of Johannesburg.
With more than two-thirds of the vote counted, the ANC had 53 percent support nationwide, with the DA on 27 percent and the radical leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) on eight percent, according to official results.
The polls opened at 7 a.m. and are scheduled to close at 7 p.m., with final results expected to be announced on August 6.
The main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) was on course to hold Cape Town and was inching ahead in the capital Pretoria and the economic hub Johannesburg as well as in the city of Port Elizabeth.
The DA is expected to maintain its control of Cape Town, the only big city now not run by the ANC, where it had a large lead over the ruling party.
Clearly the ANC still commands huge support across the country but that support is waning.
The EFF, which won six percent of the vote in the 2014 general election, advocates land redistribution without compensation and the nationalization of mines.
Millions of voters still feel a strong sense of loyalty to the ANC, which after it had been banned as a liberation movement for decades, reinvented itself in the early 1990s as the leading party for black South Africans under anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela’s leadership.
The best example is in the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, won by the DA, which has a rich history of anti-apartheid struggle. “It is not yet clear if we will win an outright majority”. “On the day (the rand) is outperforming other emerging currencies against the dollar”, ETM market analyst Ricardo Da Camara said.
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.
Lihle Spani, a voter in Johannesburg, recalled that black South Africans were unable to vote during apartheid and that voting was a kind of tribute to those who had lacked basic rights.
Advertisement
Many queuing in the winter cold said they were anxious about President Jacob Zuma’s performance and the state of Africa’s most industrialised economy, where one in four is unemployed the central bank expects zero growth this year.
