If ANC KwaZulu-Natal provincial chair Sihle Zikalala is feeling the heat, he gave no sign of it on the sidelines of the province’s final campaign rally on Sunday.I’m definitely confident that we have done well and I’m convinced the ANC is going to emerge victorious. We have reached all four corners of the province and have had a positive response,” Zikalala toldOver the past decade, KwaZulu-Natal has come to be viewed as one of the ANC’s easy wins.
That is, at least, what the party is banking on. And indeed, some KwaZulu-Natal voters interviewed byZuma was the former president of the ANC and Ramaphosa is the current president, but they are all members of the ANC,” said Mauris Ndlangisa, a Lamontville hostel-dweller who had turned out to watch Zuma present Struggle veteran Amos Ndalwane with a house on Friday.Whoever is elected by the ANC, we must rally and support. We’ll vote ANC, we won’t change.
It was the election of the ANC’s first post-apartheid isiZulu-speaking president that is generally credited with playing a major role in the decline of the IFP in the province. The IFP’s historical appeal to Zulu voters was its claim that it alone was the defender of Zulu culture and tradition in the political sphere.
And with Zuma gone from the presidency now, the IFP will be hoping to recapture some of the support that saw the party govern the province until 2004. On its side, the IFP also has the fact that the National Freedom Party, formed as a breakaway from the IFP by Zanele Magwaza-Msibi in 2011, has virtually imploded since its initially strong entry into provincial politics.
The DA, meanwhile, is hoping to improve on its 12.76% showing in the province in the 2011 elections by drawing attention to a string of governance failures in both ANC and IFP-led municipalities in the province, as well as the violent protests which have broken out in central Durban over the past week in response to the perceived favouritism shown to MK veterans in the city’s water and sanitation department.
Something that might make a difference this time around is the fact that KwaZulu-Natal recorded the highest number of new voter registrations in the country before the 8 May elections, of whom the majority are under 30.