Cape Town - With a decent voter turnout and but isolated incidents of unrest, the suspense of Wednesday’s local government elections is going to lie in its predicted photo-finish results in the country’s big metros.
As polls closed at 7pm, political party insiders were not willing to call these, echoing pollsters and analysts’ observations in the run-up to the poll that the African National Congress (ANC) and Democratic Alliance (DA) were locked in a bitterly close race for control of Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Johannesburg.
“It is so nail-bitingly close that I really would not like to say,” a senior Democratic Alliance official said of the battle for Port Elizabeth, before issuing the same disclaimer for Tshwane.
After a bloody campaign for the capital, voting in Pretoria proceeded smoothly on Wednesday and the mayoral candidate whose imposition sparked the pre-poll violence, Thoko Didiza, smilingly predicted that the ANC would hold on to power.
Casting his ballot in Cape Town, Deputy Public Works Minister Jeremy Cronin gave a characteristically honest assessment of the state of the ruling party, saying it would shed some support and find cause for soul-searching after the biggest elections, by virtue of its 26 million registered voters, in South African history.
“I think its obvious the ANC is undergoing a series of challenges which I think have to do with 22 years in incumbency which brings its challenges, which the DA (Democratic Alliance) has discovered here in Cape Town,” Cronin said.
He said the big battles would be around the metros, “particularly the metros in Gauteng and Nelson Mandela Bay”, and that, once the ballots were counted, a “great deal of soul searching would need to happen within the party”.
The impact of Wednesday’s voter turnout - which was estimated at between 50 and 60 percent by the time polls closed - would depend in large part on where voters had come out in numbers. Big numbers casting their ballots in rural areas would boost the ANC’s performance, whereas the DA would profit from a higher turnout in the metropolitan areas.
By 7pm, no credible breakdown was available.
With the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) forecast to take below ten percent in the three most tightly contested cities, the eternal election riddle remained whether the DA, and in particular under its first black leader Mmusi Maimane, had managed to lure black voters away from the movement-turned-ruling party that enfranchised the country’s majority.
Maimane’s predecessor Helen Zille found an elegant answer to what had been deemed a not pretty attempt on Maimane’s part to turn Nelson Mandela, the Nobel peace laureate and ANC icon into a poster boy for the official opposition.
“Madiba belongs to all South Africans, just as George Washington belongs to all Americans,” she told reporters before voting in Rosebank in Cape Town, adding that she thought the DA had never run a better or more “intense campaign”.
Voting went off quietly in Cape Town, where the DA has always looked set for another home run, and the worst tension of the day played itself out in Vuwani, the Limpopo township marked by violent protests over its re-demarcation.
The IEC was forced to set up tents as alternative voting venues after protesters had blocked roads and locked IEC officials out of designated polling stations.
African News Agency