The African National Congress appeared to have substantially increased its majority in the local government poll, while the Democratic Alliance, hit by voting for other opposition parties, had not done as well as as it hoped.
These appear to be the major trends of Wednesday’s voting for South Africa’s 284 municipalities.
By 6pm on Thursday, the ANC had won 145 councils, the DA eight and the IFP 10. With 94% of the votes counted, the ANC had garnered 67%, the DA 14,7% and the IFP 7%.
The Freedom Front had increased its support from 0,01% of votes nationally to 1,05%.
Results were still outstanding in Durban and Cape Town. In the latter, with 80% of the vote counted, the DA was ahead with 44% of the vote, compared to the ANC’s 34% and the ID’s 11%.
On Thursday DA leader Tony Leon called for opposition alliances in hung municipalities.
While the IFP maintained its position as the third-largest party in the country, its downward drift seems to have continued.
The fortunes of independent candidates were mixed, with race playing a role. Coloured independents in the Western Cape made inroads, but majority black groupings in areas such as Khayelitsha were wiped off the political map.
And the social movements, with little funding and scant electoral machinery, achieved substantially less than 1% of the vote where they contested local power.
Rather than cast an opposition vote, ANC voters appear to have punished the party through abstention. The overall turnout was 48,7%, much the same as in 2000.
In conflict-torn Khutsong, only about 250 out of a total of 27 000 registered voters voted. ‘People in Khutsong have made a bold statement that they feel they are both voiceless and choiceless,†said Ebrahim Fakir, senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies.
Experts also say the ANC’s decision to run a national campaign with a national message, as opposed to focusing on often weak local councillors and mayors, assisted the ruling party.
In some instances, voters believed they were voting for President Thabo Mbeki rather than for individual ward candidates. His charm offensive, in which he criss-crossed the country in the past fortnight, clearly paid dividends.
In the metropolitan areas other than Cape Town, the ANC appears to have increased its support. In Johannesburg, the ANC increased its support and won wards it lost to the DA and the IFP in 2000 and in by-elections. It was expected to increase its current 68 wards to 73, while the DA was expected to drop from 38 to about 34.
In Tshwane, the ANC increased its wards from 59 to 62 and increased its support marginally, from 57% to 58%.
In the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Council, the ANC increased its support by two percentage points to 66%, while the DA dropped by four percentage points to 24%.
ANC romps home
A dissatisfied voter in Delmas captured the essence of this week’s elections when she said she would rather vote for the ANC reluctantly than for the opposition (‘It doesn’t hurt to have hopeâ€, Page 6).
In Delmas, the percentage poll was down by 3%, but the ANC won 72% of votes cast, up from 65% in 2000.
While there was never any doubt the ANC would win comfortably, it has increased its dominance by at least 10% on the last poll. In the 2000 municipal elections, the ANC won 59,4% of the vote nationally.
DA doldrums
Support for the DA appears to have dropped, and it has once again failed to make inroads in the townships. The party blamed the split opposition vote caused by the local elections debut of the Independent Democrats.
While the DA said it had increased support since the 2004 general election, Leon acknowledged that the key trend on this occasion had been the growing number of hung municipalities. ‘We stand ready to cooperate, particularly with other opposition parties … I would like to extend an invitation to their leaderships to consider this carefully, particularly since our respective voters share many joint interests,†he said on Thursday afternoon.
Deal-making is likely to be the focus of the post-election period in Cape Town, as well as the Western and Southern Cape rural hinterland.
Hot spots
In protest hot spots other than Khutsong, the ANC also won comfortably. In Maluti, a Phofung municipality in the Free State, the first area to experience delivery protests, it won with a clear majority, as it did in Delmas in Ekurhuleni. In Sisonke municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, where there was unrest earlier this year over Matatiele’s annexation into the Eastern Cape, the ANC won a clear majority. ‘Just because people vote for the ANC, it doesn’t stop them from being angry with the party, nor does it stop them from demonstrating this,†said Steven Friedman of the Centre for Policy Studies.
ID and FF do well
The ID did surprisingly well in this election, with 2% of the vote at the time of going to press. It was fourth in the running after third-placed contender the IFP, which held 7% of the vote.
In 2000, the IFP won 9,1% of the national vote, an indication that its downward slide continues. The Pan Africanist Congress held 1,22% of the vote.
This year, 667 independent candidates stood and, although they only held 0,8% of the vote by Thursday afternoon, they still outshone the majority of splinter parties.
Trevor Ngwane’s Operation Khanyisa Movement, a political party comprising several social movements, lost all of the wards it contested. If its position does not improve, it will lose its deposit.