Mbete upbeat about ANC’s poll performance
ANC chairperson Baleka Mbete says the ruling party believes it has performed well at the polls, as results continue to trickle in.
|||Pretoria – As results for the August 3 local government elections continued to trickle in on Thursday, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) believed it had performed well at the polls.
“On the whole, the ANC has done very well and we are not surprised because I think we put up a very good fight. I think South Africans have conducted themselves very well even though there were tiny areas of concern here and there,” ANC chairperson Baleka Mbete said at the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s national results operations centre in Pretoria.
“The ANC is doing well and we hope that later on, a couple of hours from now, we might be able to look at the complete picture. Now it is not yet a complete picture (of results) so we must limit our remarks on what it says to us. On the whole, the ANC has done very well.”
Baleka told reporters that it would be wrong to suggest that the governing party had dropped the ball in the run-up to the elections.
“I don’t think we dropped the ball anywhere. Politics is a complete picture of everything that was taken into consideration, how we delivered services. We interacted with our people and we have listened to our people. We know exactly where our priorities are in terms of how we pick up on the work we have been doing in various communities,” said Mbete.
“Until such a time when all results are in from various municipalities, we cannot completely comment on what in fact has happened. Let’s wait and see what happens later.”
By 6:30am on Thursday, the ANC was at 53,63 percent on a national scale, ahead of the Democratic Alliance with 30,26 percent. The Economic Freedom Fighters was third with 6,97 percent.
EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu said his party was “not hell-bent on forming coalitions” to run municipalities.
“We, however, have a principled position we have taken, that we are not going to have any discussion for such coalitions with the ruling party. We cannot mobilise society saying they must reject the ANC, then we bring it back via the back door. It cannot be,” said Shivambu.
“We are not much hell-bent on negotiations for coalitions. We accept the position which South Africans have given us. We are not the majority party but we can be in opposition (and not be in coalitions to run the municipalities)”.
He said the EFF numbers trickling in at the national results operations centre were also satisfactory.
African News Agency