World News | S Africa's Ruling ANC Acknowledges Voter Dissatisfaction After Poor Poll Numbers

Johannesburg, Nov 3 (PTI) South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) has acknowledged that citizens are dissatisfied with the party's performance.

“The low voter turnout, especially in traditional ANC strongholds, communicates a clear message: The people are disappointed in the ANC with the slow progress in fixing local government, in ensuring quality and consistent basic services, in tackling corruption and greed,” the ANC said in a statement on Wednesday evening as the last results from local government elections all over the country trickled in.

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Analysts said the massive stayaway in the lowest poll since the first democratic elections, especially in traditional ANC strongholds such as Soweto, was their way of showing that they were unhappy with the poor service delivery at municipalities for the past decade.

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Frequent electricity loadshedding, lack of water and poor roads even in major cities have been blamed on a lack of interventions by the ANC, which held majorities in most oof South Africa's municipalities.

President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier promised interventions to address this, including the corruption that has been blamed as the source of the poor service delivery, but voters remain dissatisfied with the poor progress in this regard.

Despite just 12,2 million of the 26.2 million registered voters casting their ballots, the ANC with its lower majority still remained the dominant party in a number of municipalities, with talks around coalition governance expected to start with numerous smaller parties, who are now kingmakers despite their lower number of seats in municipalities.

Analysts said this appeared to be a last chance for the ANC to show that it could turn things around before the next general elections in 2024, otherwise the ANC was likely to get poor support there as well.

“The ANC has heard this message loud and clear. We are more determined than ever to do, and be better. We will honour the mandate we have received and the pledge we made to the citizenry.

“We are determined to improve service delivery, accountability as we build better communities, improve basic services, provide safety, economic opportunities, and build united, non-racial, non-sexist communities,” the party said.

“These results, and the turnout, is a message to our movement to shape up. The ANC will remain resolute on its path of renewal, no matter the difficulties or setbacks,” it added.

The ANC pledged that it would appoint competent people as mayors of municipalities.

“Where we received a mandate to govern, we will this week start selection of mayors who are competent and can lead the renewal of their communities. With the quarterly ANC Local Government Barometer, we will hold our representatives accountable for basic services, infrastructure and local economic development, and report to the citizens on progress and challenges,” the ANC promised.

South Africa joined the ranks of 142 countries across the globe that managed to hold elections amidst the global Covid-19 pandemic.

The Independent Electoral Commissions of South Africa earlier said that the 2021 local government elections had been the most challenging that it has had to arrange since 1994, when snaking queues elected Nelson Mandela as the country's first democratic president after decades of apartheid.

Besides the voter dissatisfaction over performance of municipalities, other factors which have been cited for the poor turnout included inclement weather in some areas and hosting the elections on a Monday instead of the traditional Wednesday, which resulted in people going away for the long weekend and therefore not casting their votes in the areas they were registered in.

Monday November 1 was the last possible date on which the five-yearly elections could be held in terms of a Constitutional Court ruling.

The elections were postponed from earlier this year because of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)