South Africa’s ruling party wins Johannesburg in narrow race

A more radical opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, contested the local elections for the first time and received 8 per cent of the vote nationwide after promising measures to help the poor. While the ANC had some introspection to do after its poor showing in the elections, Zuma was not the ANC, he said.

The African National Congress won Johannesburg but lost the Tshwane metro area that includes the capital, Pretoria, in results announced Saturday evening.

Victory in Nelson Mandela Bay would give the DA control of its second major city, and embolden the opposition ahead of national elections in 2019.

SOUTH AFRICAN political parties have a fortnight to agree on coalition arrangements in a number of municipalities or submit to fresh elections after final results for last Wednesday’s polls were reported on Saturday.

The setback to the ANC “happened quicker and harder than everyone thought!”

Saturday, independent political analyst Daniel Silke told AFP he saw a DA tie-up with EFF as hard.

Before this year’s election, the ANC had never lost a major black-majority municipality.

For a generation, the party of the country’s first black president Mr Mandela has enjoyed widespread support following its successful fight against apartheid.

A similar situation played out in the capital Tshwane where the DA got 43.11 percent of the vote against the ANC’s 41.22 percent.

“Anybody who will seek to stand up in any platform and say that the DA is a party for a particular race, particularly to say the DA is a white party, would be misleading”, Mmusi Maimane, who past year became the first black leader of the Democratic Alliance, said Saturday at a news conference. Thankfully, after such a long struggle to create a new South Africa, it finally appears to be coming to fruition even if some negatives apply. We are a party that are not going away, we part of the fabric of the politics of this country.

Only 58 percent of the electorate tuned up to cast their vote choosing mayors and other local representatives responsible for hot-button issues including water, sanitation, housing and power supplies.

Problems providing such basics trigger regular and sometimes violent “service delivery” protests in South Africa, where harsh socio-economic divisions remain a grim legacy of the apartheid era.

In a statement, the ANC said that “we will reflect and introspect where our support has dropped”. “We are a listening organization, we are going to listen to our people”, said Ramaphosa.

Zuma has been plagued by a series of scandal since taking office seven years ago. The highest court ruled in March that he violated the constitution by refusing to repay taxpayer funds used to upgrade his private home.

Political analyst professor Andre Duvenhage said the result of the election made clear the ANC would not rule until Jesus returns.

The ANC will now have to form a coalition government with the DA in provinces that it won overwhelmingly in past elections, sometimes with margins approaching 75 percent.