Former president Thabo Mbeki. Photo: Felix Dlangamandla/Gallo Images
The ANC in the Eastern Cape wants to achieve the unimaginable and garner 80% of the vote to get the party over the line and retain its majority — with the help of its stalwarts, including former president Thabo Mbeki.
Eastern Cape secretary Lulama Ngcukayitobi told the Mail & Guardian on Monday that the possibility of the ANC achieving this in the province was “high”.
“We have been throughout the province; leaders have been going throughout and there is a demand for more leaders to go and address the traditional leaders. We have met the traditional healers, we have met all sectors of society because we have got that capacity and adequacy to address people,” he said.
The M&G previously reported that ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa had said in a leaked recording that the party would need 14 million votes to get a clear victory in the 29 May elections, and that it was hoping for high numbers from Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape.
The Eastern Cape has the third highest electorate in the country, after KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. The province has been the party’s historical stronghold, with some of its more prominent veterans including Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela.
Its voter share peaked at 79% in ??, but declined over the next election cycles. In 2019 the party received its lowest result in the province since 1994, garnering just 69% of the votes.
Ngcukayitobi said the Eastern Cape was integral to the ANC’s overall outcome on election day, and that the party was working to ensure that its supporters did not take for granted that it would win, and would go out in their numbers to vote.
“It’s important that every citizen within our province goes out and vote. If it’s possible to have a voter turnout at 100% that will be a huge contribution to the national electability and election prospects for the ANC. The Eastern Cape is very important, it has a history of struggle,” he said, adding that people in the province must rise to defend the gains of democracy.
The ANC believe the decline in support in past elections is a result of its supporters failing to turn out in their numbers. In 2019, the party’s vote share nationally?? declined to 57% from 62% in 2014, a result many pollsters and pundits believe signalled it will dip below 50% in the 2024 elections.
Ngcukayitobi said the different sectors of the ANC had a united voice against any paralysis of the government and that they were aware of the party’s strengths and weaknesses and had expressed a willingness to assist it.
“People have got a package of things they think we should do more,” he said.
Mbeki — who has become central in the ANC’s campaign machinery, participating in door-to-door campaigns in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng — is expected to visit Nelson Mandela Bay this week. He is likely to visit the burial site of his father and struggle hero, Goven Mbeki, and to participate in a programme with the Eastern Cape’s business sector hosted by its progressive business forum.
Mbeki will speak alongside Mmamoloko Kubayi, the party’s subcommittee chair on economic transformation, and Sipho Pityana, another former ANC leader who has been critical of the party in recent years, forming the Save South Africa movement against the Jacob Zuma regime.
Ngcukayitobi said Mbeki was an asset to the ANC and had helped amplify the need for people to take the elections seriously and go out to vote.
“His visit is one of the central pillars of our campaign strategy to talk to disgruntled people because of the intra dynamics of the ANC of whether they are disgruntled because this element of doing more has not reached their areas,” he said, adding that Mbeki would send the ANC’s message that it was on a renewal path and purging rogue elements in the organisation.
“His message has been amplifying the voice of the ANC in areas that still seek to think that we have not done enough to change the circumstances of our people. We welcome that particular visit and we welcome that deployment but it should be seen in the context of amplifying the prospects of the ANC winning,” Ngcukayitobi said.
The ANC has also leaned on former president Kgalema Motlanthe, former deputy presidents David Mabuza and Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka and the former speaker of the national assembly, Baleka Mbete, to drive its election message.
The party is targeting 11 million voters nationally to achieve its 2019 electoral outcome of 57%, head of elections Mdumiseni Ntuli has previously said.
Ngcukayitobi said Nelson Mandela Bay was important for the ANC’s prospects in the elections and that the party needed to do more to woo voters in the affluent areas of the metro.
“It is where the struggles were waged by the people of our area to take head on the apartheid colonial regime. So his [Mbeki’s] voice in that particular area is very important to the ANC, it’s just that he is limited as a human being but we wish he could have visited even more of our areas,” he said.
The ANC suffered a humiliating defeat in 2016 local government elections when it lost its majority in Nelson Mandela Bay to a coalition led by the Democratic Alliance (DA). Unable to regain its position, the ANC then opted to support smaller parties to unseat the DA.
The party has also struggled to regain support in the predominantly coloured and Muslim areas in the metro. These numbers first went to the DA before later shifting to smaller parties, reflecting their frustration with the poor delivery of services.
Ngcukayitobi said there was a distortion that the ANC had lost its influence among coloured and Muslim people in Nelson Mandela Bay to the DA. He argued that the DA was the biggest loser in the 2021 elections, with the ANC’s vote increasing by 2%.
“The biggest loser in the NMB [Nelson Mandela Bay] is the DA, which has been rejected by both the African communities that they hold, and they have lost elections with the coloured communities. That vote that was lost by the DA did not go to the ANC, it went to the Patriotic Alliance, it went to the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance is not contesting these elections. So the winners in the NMB were smaller parties,” he said.
He added that the ANC had been working with people supporting Palestinians in their war with Israel, saying: “We wish that that particular message can be amplified by [Mbeki’s] visit to NMB. We have been working in that particular area. We have been working with the pro-Palestinian Muslim communities throughout the country.
“I’ve been deployed in the Western Cape. I met various Khoi-San communities that have been raising issues that relate to the conduct of the DA in so far as the support for Israel and they are being mum on fundamental atrocities meted against the people of Palestine by apartheid Israel.
“We think we are going to gain more votes because of this particular principled stance on matters of peace and justice throughout the world,” Ngcukayitobi added.
He conceded that there were areas of concern in the Eastern Cape regarding the ANC’s service delivery records and that people had expressed frustration over the government’s slow pace in addressing infrastructural problems.
“There is a great appreciation that there is a lot of work that has been done over the past 30 years to create an environment of a better life for all and these are amplified by the ability to create jobs whilst there is still a huge demand for opportunities for the people who work in the Eastern Cape,” he said.
The provincial government had dealt “decisively” with poverty, he claimed, and there were fewer cases where there was a threat of malnutrition, compared with the apartheid era.
“People think about the expansion of the economic opportunities particularly in the agricultural sector. There must be a deliberate investment in the agricultural sector. There are serious concerns about the security of our people given the extent of the problems around the main cities of gangsterism, people who will demand money for protection. People are demanding the ANC must do something about that,” Ngcukayitobi said.
But, in 2023, the South African Human Rights Commission said child malnutrition in the Eastern Cape should be declared a disaster to compel the government to intervene immediately and decisively.
The commission found that a substantial percentage of children in the province were suffering from various forms of malnutrition, the Daily Maverick reported.