Zuma also urged the people of Tembisa not to waste their vote on the Economic Freedom Fighters because the party was based on nothing other than revenge
After a torrid week, President Jacob Zuma visited the remote municipality of eDumbe in KwaZulu-Natal on Saturday to celebrate the ANC’s first ever victory there.
”When he campaigned in the area, he said he would come back and celebrate with them,” said one of the event organisers Mhlaba Memela.
He would also lend his ear for input on service delivery problems, given the fresh council poised to deal with local problems.
The ANC, which Zuma heads, ousted the National Freedom Party which was disqualified from the August 3 elections because it did not pay its electoral deposit. This paved the way for the ANC to improve its 27.85% showing in 2011.
The NFP had received 51.7% of the vote in 2011.
The trip to visit residents in the town, near old Anglo-Zulu and Anglo-Boer battle sites, comes at the end of a week of high drama for Zuma.
On Tuesday he withdrew a court application to block the public protector’s release of a report into an investigation over whether the wealthy Gupta family may have had a hand in his short-lived appointment of Des Van Rooyen as finance minister last December. The report had also probed whether there was irregularity in a massive Eskom coal contract with the Guptas.
With the release of the State of Capture report came a transcript of a four-hour interview with Zuma and former public protector Thuli Madonsela, which appeared to contradict his earlier claim that he had not been able to respond to her questions related to the probe.
He was briefly shielded from the local fallout over the report during a trip to Zimbabwe for a bilateral commission with President Robert Mugabe.
ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe said after the elections that the ”negative narrative” about Zuma, specifically on the Nkandla controversy, affected the party’s performance when it dropped to 54.49% of the vote in 2016, from 62.93% in 2011.
The ANC received 51.16% of the votes cast on August 3 this year, with the Democatic Alliance trailing at 29.51%, the Inkatha Freedom Party at 15.97%, Economic Freedom Fighters 1.84% and the African People’s Convention at 0.83%. The Freedom Front Plus got 0.71%.
The area is known by older generations as Paulpietersburg. – News24