Thursday was a phenomenal day for former president Jacob Zuma's Umkhonto Wesizwe party (MK), as they cleared the 500,000 votes hurdle on the first day of vote counting.
The MK party jumped past the EFF for the third spot nationally with 510,760 votes, while the red berets were a close fourth with 486,422 votes at the 40% mark of all voting districts counted.
The MK has also had a sizeable lead in the KwaZulu-Natal province, where it has a 42% lead with 175,656 votes after 18.9% of the voting districts were counted as of Thursday night at 9.30pm.
Things were looking gloomy for the ANC in KZN as the IFP jumped into second spot with 21.08% or 86,717 votes, while the ANC had 21.06% slice or 86,635 votes.
MK smiles
At the Elections Results Operations Centre in Midrand, the MK members led by Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, were in good spirits all day as they kept ticking upwards on the scoreboard.
Zuma-Sambudla has reportedly ruled out any possibility of a coalition with the ANC, although she did share a warm moment with ANC chairperson Gwede Mantashe, who admitted he was shocked by the performance of the party formed in December.
At the 40% of voting districts counted mark, the ANC remained top, with 2.15 million votes representing 41.8%, the DA had 1.2 million votes representing 23.97% and the EFF in fourth had 486,422 votes representing 9.37% of the votes.
The PA in fifth also had 165,075 votes representing 3.18% of the vote.
At the moment, the new parties of the MK and the PA, could be sending an estimated 10 and four members to Parliament respectively as things stand.
IEC
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During the final press conference for the day, the IEC’s general manager Granville Abrahams said they had counted at least 55% of the votes, but there some delays on the board in order to ensure accuracy.
He said counting would continue through the night and explained that most of the results projected on the results board on Thursday night were from smaller, rural municipalities and voting districts, which were often smaller and quicker and easier to count.
He said it was still early days and the results from the big metros of Joburg, Durban, Tshwane, Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay were expected to start filtering on Friday.
“As far as the voter roll population, the metros constitute more than 55% of all voters. That is where we have the current lag.
“A number of our stations closed late, and with that, it had a knock on effect with counting,” said Abrahams.
The IEC expects it will announce the results on Sunday.
IOL