Former KwaZulu-Natal Premier S'bu Ndebele cast his vote at Northwood High School. Photo: Paddy Harper
Former KwaZulu-Natal premier S'bu Ndebele said on Wednesday it was “unfair and inaccurate” for the media to portray former president Jacob Zuma as the leader who led the ANC to win KwaZulu-Natal in 2004.
Ndebele made the remarks at Northwood High School in Durban's north – the same polling station used by Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen.
“The ANC campaigned very hard in KwaZulu-Natal in 2004 under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki and me and it is unfair and inaccurate to attribute this achievement to others,” Ndebele said.
More than 95 per cent of KwaZulu-Natal's 4,974 polling stations were ready to accept votes at 7am as scheduled, although delays in opening were reported in eThekwini metro and other parts of the province.
Provincial electoral commissioner Ntombifuti Masinga told the Mail and Guardian that the majority of delays in vote counting were caused by police escorts arriving late to transport election materials to the polling stations in question.
The province has more than 5.7 million registered voters and is one of the most hotly contested, with the ANC facing threats from both the DA-Inkatha Freedom Party coalition and the splintered Umkhonto we'Sizwe party.
Masinga said voting in the province was “generally going smoothly” but there were delays in eThekwini, Uthukela, Mtubatuba, Jozini and Ugu districts due to a “lack of police to escort personnel transporting sensitive materials”.
The service delivery protests affected three polling stations in Umjiwabantu, with two being delayed in opening by an hour after they were blocked by “political parties”.
Masinga said in Eshowe Ward 7, a South African Electoral Commission (IEC) regional manager was prevented from leaving a storage centre by a political party but the situation was deflated by police.
There was also the issue of political parties trying to get into the state's storage centres where special votes cast on Monday and Tuesday were being kept until they were added to the ballot boxes when polls closed on Wednesday.
“The situation is going well. The only disturbance was last night at a warehouse where officials were trying to keep guard overnight. The South African Police chased them away but some remained outside the gate all night,” Masinga said.
“You can imagine they're worried about what happened to the special ballot boxes overnight. We've never had this issue before. It's something new.”
Water tankers had to be trucked in to the 33 polling stations in eThekwini because no water had been delivered in advance and the health department wanted them closed.
“Luckily, everything is accessible in the metro. We deliver water in 25-litre containers,” she said.
Most polling stations visited by the M&G saw long queues of voters gathering to cast their ballot in what are perhaps the most significant and hotly contested national and state elections since 1994.
Steenhuisen also voted at his alma mater, Northwood High School, where more than 400 people had already voted by the time he arrived at 9.30am.
He hopes the South African multi-party constitution can oust the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, where the ruling party won 55.4% of the vote in 2019.
Steenhausen said he was “very confident” the two sides could secure the 50 percent plus 1 percent needed to form a new government.
“If this is not the case, we will hold a multi-party constitutional meeting in the coming days to assess the current situation and decide what steps to take next,” Steenhausen said.
He said the DA would only form coalitions with parties that shared its values and that the DA and its coalition partners would “act in the best interests of South Africans”.
