The African National Congress national chairperson Gwede Mantashe says he is shocked by the Umkhonto Wesizwe party’s strong showing in KwaZulu-Natal.
The IEC’s election dashboard after just 7% votes counted in KZN showed that the MK party, which is led by former president Jacob Zuma, was the leading party in the province with 41.77% (or 56,931 votes).
The ANC followed second with 21.06% (or 28,699 votes), the IFP was third with 17.08% (23,277 votes) of the vote and the DA was a close fourth with 13.46% (18,342 votes) while the EFF was a distant fifth with 2.28% (3,109 votes).
“MK is doing well in KZN, they have surprised me,but I am not expecting the same in other provinces,” he said speaking to journalists at the Results Operations.
Mantashe blamed journalists, saying they have contributed to the ANC’s decline. He accused one of the TV news stations of punting “vote for change” headlines all afternoon on election day.
”When journalists do that, they seize to be journalists, they become pundits,” said Mantashe. “We are going to swim against that stream, we are streaming against it and we are going to be successful,” he said.
He added that they would develop a strategy to deal with the “threat” of MK.
The MK’s chief of staff Lei Mchunu, said they were excited about the results so far in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN).
MK is six months old as a registered political party and is leading the province in terms of numbers.
“We are very happy, excited to see the numbers on the board. Here we are talking about the MK that is six months old. What you see here is very amazing.
“For us going to the people, talking to the masses… Nevertheless, the KZN numbers,I can assure you these numbers are going to escalate more because we know what the people want,” said Mchunu.
Earlier on Thursday, slammed the IEC for “mismanaging the ongoing electoral process by undermining the constitutional rights of all South Africans to freely choose their government”.
They say the commission “showed lack of competence by ignoring to communicate critical changes to the Electoral Act, specifically Section 24”, with regards to changes in law about how people could only vote where they were registered.
The MK’s head of elections, Muzi Ntshingila, said “this change was poorly communicated merely days before the elections, leading to widespread confusion and disenchantment among the electorate”.
“Such missteps not only compromise the electoral process but also frustrated citizens whose primary concern is a change towards a better life from the pains of the (President Cyril) Ramaphosa-ANC,” he said.
They also called on IEC top management to resign for bringing the organisation into disrepute.
Meanwhile, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has predicted the final results for the elections, with the elections forecasters projecting a massive 15% drop for the ANC.
The CSIR made its prediction at 8.5% of the votes counted.
In the 2019 elections, their prediction was just 2% off the mark for the major established parties. They explained that projections were difficult for new parties like the MK as they had no data to compare to.
Earlier this morning, Professor Pravesh Debba of the CSIR, said their model was predicting the final votes tally could reflect a 42% tally for the ANC, 22% for the DA, 12.8% for the MK and 9% for the EFF.
By 10am, the CSIR prediction tool still had the ANC steady at 42%, while the DA dropped to 21.% and the EFF was steady at 9%. The MK was being predicted upwards to 14%.
Prof Debba said the projection of the MK could be well overstated by the model due to no previous data to assist the model. He explained the difficulty of new parties, in 2014 for the EFF’s first elections, the model predicted 3-4%, but the EFF secured double at 8.39%.
The CSIR has been predicting elections since 1999, with a high degree of accuracy.
The CSIR model makes continuous updates as more data becomes available.
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