As early results from the tightly-contested 2024 general elections were trickling in on Thursday morning, the Umkhonto we Sizwe political party (MK) led by former president Jacob Zuma has castigated the Electoral Commission of South Africa which struggled to deal with the high voter turnout in some parts of the country.
On Wednesday night, IOL reported that the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) was forced to rope in thousands of counting officers to help mitigate long queues at some voting stations.
There were snaking queues late last night at metros in Gauteng, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape which forced the commission to request counting officers, who were due to work later, to come in earlier.
Speaking to SABC at the national results operations centre in Midrand, MK party secretary general Sihle Ngubane said last night he frantically tried to engage the IEC, and alleged that some voters were turned away.
“Our party agents were saying, please we want help. I was phoning the IEC at night yesterday, they (people) were saying we want help, we still need to vote. The electricity was cut. This was a chaotic election,” said Ngubane.
“I am totally disappointed at the IEC handling of the whole thing. We did very well, the numbers speak for themselves. We are doing very well in all provinces, you can see the numbers trickling in that we worked very hard to get these numbers that we are getting.”
As the election results were trickling in on Thursday morning, early indications showed that Zuma-led Umkhonto we Sizwe party was giving the ANC a bloody nose in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, standing a chance to reduce the ruling party’s majority, if not take the province.
Ngubane said the numbers coming from KwaZulu-Natal were “encouraging”.
“As MK, we are very much encouraged by the numbers. Everything so far, the numbers are predictive of what we spoke about. The main thing that as MK we want to raise, we are very much disappointed on the gross misconduct and incompetence from IEC.
“We told IEC that this 2024 election is exactly similar election as in 1994. There were long queues in eThekwini, Chesterville ... there were VDs (voting districts) which were closed when people were still on the queue. As MK party, we are totally, totally disappointed with the IEC’s performance. They were supposed to be predictive, they were supposed to have seen the situation.”
Ngubane said when Zuma announced that he will be taking part in the elections, under the banner of the MK party, registration numbers peaked, showing a massive interest in this year’s elections.
On Thursday morning, IOL reported that thousands of voters around the country were still in queues after midnight on Thursday waiting to cast their votes after the May 29 elections were rocked by snaking queues around the country, particularly in the metros of Durban, Joburg and Cape Town.
The Electoral Commission of South Africa insisted during a press conference on Wednesday night that all voting would take place and conclude, bemoaning the logistical nightmare and security of millions of ballots, should an extra day be required for voting.
The seismic delays stemmed from the voter management devices (VMDs) which persistently glitched at several municipalities around the country as voters queued to cast their vote.
Around 2pm on Wednesday, the IEC sent a circular to presiding officers and area managers, instructing them to ditch the VMDs and to utilise the manual ballot voters’roll if the devices were seen to be more obstructive than helpful to the work of the IEC.
IOL