Malevolent: Former ANC president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe party has, in the past two months, thrice gone to the electoral court, and plans to make a fourth visit. Photo: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
The uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party said this week it would make good on Jacob Zuma’s threat to challenge the outcome of the national elections in court.
“We are going to take the matter to court,” MK spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela told the Mail & Guardian.
He would not be drawn on the legal basis for challenging the outcome of the vote, in which the party, founded late last year, won 14.58% of the national ballot and a sweeping 45.93% in KwaZulu-Natal.
Zuma’s preferred senior counsel, Dali Mpofu, who is representing him in his legal tussle with Jabulani Khumalo over the party leadership, has not been briefed and the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has not been served papers.
Publicly the party has put on record little besides Zuma’s bald claim at the IEC’s national Results and Operations Centre on Saturday that there were “funny tricks” in vote counting and that his party was deprived of a two-thirds majority.
Zuma gave no indication as to how he arrived at the calculation that his party won four-and-a-half times the number of votes in its favour captured by the IEC, but there might be a hint in the fact a two-thirds majority is the holy grail that would enable it to implement its manifesto promise of changing the Constitution.
A source with insight into the MK party’s legal strategy said it would allege that a foreign national with a history of election rigging in East Africa was brought to South Africa to skew the vote, but spirited out of the country by a cabinet minister once his presence was detected.
It might not seem a watertight case, but that is not the point. A mediatised high court hearing, and any eventual petitions for leave to appeal, will allow the party to sustain the narrative that the election was stolen and that the coalition government being negotiated is illegitimate for many months to come. It will also give Zuma further pretext for his attacks on the integrity of the courts.
All other parties have accepted the election results. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose 9.5% saw it recede to the position of fourth-biggest party from third, did so with mature composure before pronouncing itself ready to go into coalition with the ANC.
For some of those excluded from the coalition talks, the decision not to object to the outcome despite a myriad grievances was taken partly to put distance between themselves and the MK party.
Well-known Western Cape political activist Zachie Achmat, who ran as an independent candidate, was one of 17 signatories to a letter alleging irregularities in vote counting and capturing in the province, where the Democratic Alliance retained its outright majority with 55.3%. They demanded that the timeframe in which objections could be lodged be extended beyond 9pm last Friday.
He subsequently withdrew his endorsement for fear that “anti-democratic forces aim to discredit a credible result provincially and nationally”.
Songezo Zibi, the leader of Rise Mzansi, said his party filed roughly 30 complaints about serious incidents around the country, but would not demand a recount.
A source in the party said although these may well have had a material effect on its vote share, it did not want to “muddy the waters more” given Zuma’s campaign to undermine the credibility of the elections.
Rise Mzansi, the EFF, the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), the Patriotic Alliance, Al Jama-ah and the Good party were among those who co-signed the complaint filed in the Western Cape, which one observer likened to “a class action suit”, about alleged irregularities in vote counting and capturing.
The EFF was protesting the alleged disappearance of 100 of the 156 votes for the party initially captured in the Theewaterskloof voting district.
Al Jama-ah complained that votes cast by the party’s own candidates were not captured.
A similar complaint was raised by Rise Mzansi, who said although several of its officials cast their votes at a primary school in Observatory in Cape Town, it strangely did not receive a single regional vote. The FF+ has raised equivalent concerns.
The electoral commission was this week still reconciling the number of complaints it had received at national and regional level. One of the commissioners involved in that process said it planned to release a statement with a final tally at the end of the week, while stressing that complaints about voting day glitches did not constitute objections to the outcome.
If the MK party does challenge the election result, it will be the party’s fourth outing to the electoral court in its short existence.
The last two months of the election campaign was dominated by its ultimately failed bid to overturn the IEC’s decision to uphold complaints that Zuma’s 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court disqualified him from standing for a seat in the National Assembly in terms of section 47(1)(e) of the Constitution.
The electoral court on Monday reserved judgment in Khumalo’s urgent application to be reinstated as leader of the party.
He submitted that he sent a letter to the IEC on 9 April communicating thatZuma was the party’s presidential candidate and that his face should appear next to the MK party’s name on the ballot paper.
The following day, he said in court papers that Zuma’s daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, sent another letter to the IEC on the same day after his signature and the MK party’s letterhead.
“The communication was different from what the applicant [Khumalo] as the leader of the party communicated in which Ms Zuma-Sambudla records that Mr Zuma be recorded as the party leader of the MKP.”
Mpofu, for Zuma, countered that he should have approached the high court because he was alleging a crime, and that the electoral court was not competent to decide the case.
Last week, the electoral court heard the IEC’s application to nullify Visvin Reddy’s candidacy for a seat in the National Assembly. He was at number nine on the MK’s list for the legislature. The commission argued that he violated sections 87 and 93 of the Electoral Act with incendiary comments made in the run-up to the elections.
This refers specifically to Reddy telling supporters “there will be anarchy in this country” if the courts found that Zuma was not eligible for parliament. The court reserved judgment.