Pretoria – The 2016 municipal elections were incident free and there were no incidents within the voting stations reported to the SA Police Service on Wednesday, Acting National Police Commissioner Lieutenant General Kgomotso Phahlane said.
“As the South African Police Service we are very grateful of the executions of our plan. We did communicate our plans to the nation pre-, during- and post- elections,” he said at the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s National Results Operations Centre in Pretoria.
“We committed ourselves to deliver a safe and secure local government elections 2016 and our members did us proud and they delivered that. We had an incident-free election process. We are grateful to the South Africans who responded positively to our call when we asked them to corporate and work together with the police.”
He said that about 650 areas were initially marked as high-risk, about 1328 medium-risk and the remainder of the 22,612 were marked as low-risk. Phahlane said he has been around monitoring the situation throughout the day.
“Even those that we considered as high-risk became low-risk. We did not have any incidents or challenges in as far as deployment is concerned.”
Phahlane denied reports of a shooting in violence-ridden Vumani, in Limpopo.
“We did not have any shooting in any voting station,” he said.
He said there was an incident in KwaZulu-Natal where a man was shot, but it did not happen in the vicinity of a voting station.
“Two friends, one wearing this party’s T-Shirt, the other one wearing that party’s T-Shirt in the exchange one pulled a firearm and shot the friend and the friend died. One person was arrested and the firearm was confiscated,” Phahlane said.
“But we do not have any shooting in a voting station or in the proximity of a voting station.”
Phahlane proudly showed off his left thumb and said he voted earlier on Wednesday morning.
“I voted, here is my mark. I can’t deny myself the opportunity to exercise my democratic right,” he said.
African News Agency