South Africa Elections : ANC leads national vote with 62%
Ibraheem Gafar with agency report
African National Congress (ANC) was leading the fifth national elections with 62.45% of the vote on Friday morning, according to provisional results. The party according to TVC report had garnered 10, 481, 963 votes so far, which was 62.45% of the counted vote just after 09:00. ANC in 2009 had won the national elections with 65.90% of the vote. On Friday morning, 95.37% of the national count had been completed. According to the Electoral Commission, 21, 232 out of 22, 263 voting districts had been counted. There were 16, 785, 905 valid votes counted so far and 233, 570 void votes. Democratic Alliance was still holding the second spot with 22.01% of the vote. There was a little more than a 6.7 million gap between the DA’s 3, 694, 312 counted votes and the ANC’s. In 2009, the DA retained its position as the official opposition with 16.66% of the vote. Head of the DA’s 2014 campaign Jonathan Moakes earlier said his party had grown by a third since 2009. Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) looked set to go to Parliament this year. A political party needs around 47, 000 votes to get a seat in the National Assembly and the EFF currently held third spot nationally with 1, 029, 254 votes counted, which was 6.13%. Mamphela Ramphele’s Agang SA had only received 44, 714 votes so far, which was 0.27%. During her campaign and on election day, Ramphele was very vocal about her party’s chances in this year’s election, but by Thursday morning, when the results started coming in, she declined to speak to media. Reporters tried to speak to her three times while at the results centre, but interview requests were turn down. Ramphele has not returned to the IEC’s results centre in Pretoria since Thursday morning.
