/UPDATE/POLITICS-SOUTH AFRICA: "It’s Now Time for the People to Speak"

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jacklynne Hobbs

PRETORIA, Apr 14 2004 (IPS) - Just an hour and a half after polling stations in South Africa closed Wednesday night, results for the country’s third democratic election were already starting to roll in.

Just an hour and a half after polling stations in South Africa closed Wednesday night, results for the country’s third democratic election were already starting to roll in.

Officials had set 21.00 local time (19.00 GMT) as the deadline for people to cast ballots. However, long queues outside certain polling stations meant they had to remain open to accommodate voters. Over 20 million people – 75 percent of possible voters – were registered to partake in the election of national and provincial legislatures.

Addressing journalists at the headquarters of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in South Africa’s capital – Pretoria – Chief Electoral Officer Pansy Tlakula said the organisation was unable to provide any figures about voter turnout yet.

KwaZulu-Natal appeared to be one of the provinces most affected by late closures of polling stations. This region, the stronghold of the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), is one of only two provinces where victory by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is not a foregone conclusion.

Tensions between the IFP and the ANC have resulted in several politically related deaths – although the violence is a far cry from that which claimed thousands of lives in the run-up to South Africa’s first general election in 1994. That poll brought an end to white minority rule, and the infamous apartheid regime that discriminated against blacks.

Three bomb scares were investigated by police in Gauteng and KwaZulu- Natal – but officials found the scares to be hoaxes. Selebi denied reports of a scare in the Northwest province.

In its first election briefing, the IEC said that 13 presiding officers at polling stations in KwaZulu-Natal had been relieved of their duties because they had been found to be campaigning, while a similar incident was reported in the Limpopo province. A later briefing revealed that four of the KwaZulu officers had in fact been dismissed for "performance related matters", while three resigned voluntarily.

Tlakula declined to answer an IPS query about which parties the remaining officers had been campaigning for – or how these activities had been conducted.

"In the interests of ensuring free and fair elections, we will not disclose the political activity that these presiding officers were taking part in. We will not disclose the parties for which they were campaigning," she said.

More than a hundred bar-coded stickers were also discovered at a workers’ hostel in Durban, prompting investigations by electoral authorities. This followed IFP claims that a reporter from the British Broadcasting Corporation had witnessed ruling party activists inserting bar-coded stickers into identity documents to enable possibly illicit voting. The stickers are a key element of IEC precautions to prevent vote-rigging.

Thirty-seven parties contested the 2004 poll, although not all of them at both the national and provincial levels. "Crime, corruption and unemployment, as well as HIV/AIDS, feature prominently in this election. They are issues that are critical to most voters," Khabele Matlosa of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa told IPS.

Said voter Marietha de Beer, "I saw a summary of what each party was standing for, and then I realized that the party that I previously thought I was going to vote for, was not standing for what I thought they were. I strongly believe that the death sentence must come back, so I voted for a party that stood for that."

"I personally feel that we are not protected enough. We had a burglary, our second burglary, three days ago," she added.

Between 30 and 40 percent of South Africans are unemployed. While the ANC claims that about two million new jobs have been created on its watch, this figure has been hotly disputed by opposition parties – which say a million positions have actually been lost.

The ANC has pledged to create a million new jobs through a public works programme. The DA, describing these as transient employment opportunities, countered by blanketing Pretoria and Johannesburg with campaign posters that promised "One Million REAL Jobs".

Similarly, the ANC has used its extension of worker rights to farm labourers and domestic servants as a draw card for voters, (the IEC reported Wednesday that a farmer in the Northern Cape province had dismissed his workers for going to cast their ballots). The DA campaigned on a platform that included various tax cuts, and the deregulation of a working environment that it described as having too many legal constraints.

A voter in the black settlement of Mamelodi near Pretoria, Sprinkaan Phora, was skeptical about all comers: "I’ve looked. They all promise good things, but I don’t know if they’re going to make them work, or if they just want us to vote for them!"

As a result of the long tussle between government and AIDS activists over the provision of anti-retrovirals (ARVs), national policies to deal with the pandemic were central to the campaign – following Mbeki right to the polling booth Wednesday.

Responding to a question about the difficulty certain AIDS patients were still experiencing in getting hold of ARVs under the government’s new drug provision programme, Mbeki said "We talked about that in the election campaign…You were not listening?"

He also told journalists that "The politicians have been doing a lot of talking. I think it’s now time for the people to speak."