Johannesburg - There was a lot of vote counting to do in Joburg still on Thursday morning with votes from only 8 percent of the city’s registered voters tallied by 9am.
The early trends in the city gave the DA 45 percent against the ANC’s 40 percent, with the EFF trailing with about 10 percent and no other party worth looking at.
In Tshwane, the votes of about 16 percent of registered voters were counted, giving the DA 48 percent, the ANC 40 percent and the EFF 9 percent.
In Ekurhuleni, the 19 percent of registered voters showed the DA at 44 percent and the ANC at 42 percent.
In the hotly contested Nelson Mandela Bay metro (Port Elizabeth), about a fifth of the registered voters had been counted, with the DA at 56 percent and the ANC at 35 percent.
Cape Town was further ahead in the count and had about 71 percent DA against 20 percent ANC support.
Traditionally, the counts from townships and poorer areas come in later, and those are areas more likely to favour the ANC over the DA.
The voting trends in Joburg weren’t really a surprise.
Ward 8 (Lenasia, Lehae, Lawley and Thembelihle) and ward 20 (Lenasia), previously ANC seats, were heading to the DA, while the Soweto votes that had been counted retained the ANC seats.
The Fordsburg and Mayfair areas looked undecided, the ANC barely managed one-in-two votes in Cosmo City while the DA and EFF split the rest.
By 9.30am on Thursday morning, nationally the ANC had about 55 percent so far against the DA’s 34 percent and the EFF’s 5 percent.
By 7am on Thursday morning, the ANC had won 12 councils to the DA’s four. No other party had won any.
The DA took Kouga (Eastern Cape) which had previously been an ANC council, took control of Swellendam (Western Cape) which had previously been a hung council, and retained Bergrivier and Overstrand.
The ANC’s 12 were all small councils in the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and Northern Cape; it had previously held 11 of them and now adds Karoo Hoogland (Northern Cape), previously a hung council.
But these are all the small councils, and none of the metros are in yet.
Elsewhere, it emerged that the financial struggle to keep the lights on didn’t cost the ANC any votes in Kamiesberg.
The first election count finished on Wednesday was for the tiny Kamiesberg local municipality in the Northern Cape, where the ANC not only retained control but increased its results to 63 percent of the vote from the 2011 result of 54 percent.
That meant the ANC took four seats there, the DA got two and the EFF got one.
Kamiesberg is one of the municipalities which Eskom threatened to disconnect for failing to pay the electricity bills.
Civil action group AfriForum took Eskom to court to stop the cut offs and the court papers revealed that Kamiesberg owed Eskom R7.6 million in May last year, paid off some of that but then defaulted again on payments. By June this year, National Treasury reports showed that Kamiesberg owed Eskom R12.7m in outstanding bills.
Elections Bureau