Voting is done and the lights are still on

Thursday.

It’s been less than 12 hours since the last vote was cast in eThekwini ward 33 and life is already back to normal.

The count is still on for the ward — the Democratic Alliance is ahead, with the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party second and the ANC third — with a final declaration expected at about 3pm.

In the meantime, the bins are in the street, waiting — hopefully — to be picked up by Durban Solid Waste.

The broken water main outside 12 Stella Grove is still gushing water into the street and the hole the city left when they fixed the broken sewer on the corner six months ago has still not been filled.

The lights are — thankfully — still on.

I had half expected to receive a load-shedding notification on my phone within minutes of my name being ticked off on the voters’ roll in the polling station at Glenwood Preparatory, where I am registered.

So far Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa is living up to his word, but whether this abundance of electricity remains after the final votes are counted and the parties start divvying up the spoils remains to be seen.

One lives in hope.

Election day has come and gone and the frenzied campaign for the national and provincial elections is finally over.

The voters have voted — it felt like far more of us did so on 29 May than in 2019 — and the counting is well under way, with a result anticipated by Sunday.

All roads now lead to the Results Operations Centre, where the eyes of the political party leaders — and punters like myself — will be glued to the boards until the final count has been declared.

The governing party is already showing well in the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape — no surprises there — but it’s very early in the day for any predictions beyond a nightmare for the ANC right now.

The high-figure voter districts in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal are always among the last to be counted, and with a third ballot paper in the mix for the first time, the wait for their figures to reach the boards is likely to be a long one.

Chest pains definitely await the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal.

Jacob Zuma’s MK party appears to have numbered the numbers in the north of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as in Durban and in Pietermaritzburg and will definitely be taking up the bulk of the seats previously occupied in the legislature by the ANC.

It was a thing of great beauty and splendour to witness my fellow South Africans turning out in their millions to make their mark on Wednesday.

Late starts, technology glitches, long queues and late surges of voters may have tested Mzansi’s patience — we all went to Home Affairs to apply for an ID at the same time — but the vast majority eventually got their ballots into the box by the time the stations belatedly closed.

There was a fair amount of calling of the manager going on at Northwood School, where Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen cast his vote.

Former premier S’bu Ndebele arrived minutes before Steenhuisen’s scheduled appearance, hijacking the TV cameras and stealing John’s thunder.

John was forced to delay his money shot moment until the former premier and his wife Zama had filled their ballots, but appeared to have got over it by the time the cameras started rolling outside the polling station.

This election may not have been the second 1994 the opposition parties promised us, but it certainly felt as if the queues were far longer than they were the last time we went to the polls.

One wonders whether the seemingly big numbers — and the late surge of voting — had anything to do with President Cyril Ramaphosa legalising marijuana the night before the elections.

The head of state signed the Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill into law literally hours before South Africans voted, after sitting on it for several months.

Stoners are among the planet’s least decisive beings — perhaps Ramaphosa hoped to capitalise on this and make our minds up for us by giving the holy herb the legal nod the night before we voted.

Cynical, indeed, but strategic, in a Cupcake sort of way.

There is, of course, a downside to this strategy of announcing legalisation at the last moment, given the short-term memory loss associated with excessive use of the wacko tobacco.

By the time most of us would have remembered to go and vote ANC to thank them for the legal weed, the polling stations would already have been closed.

We are (for the moment) led.