By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The African National Congress (ANC) National Chairperson Gwede Mantashe is confident that they will perform better, as early indications showed the party is losing ground.
Mantashe was the first senior ANC leader to visit the IEC results centre on Thursday as results began to show the extent of the devastation of ANC support in KwaZulu-Natal.
The IEC’s election dashboard after just 7% votes counted in KZN showed that the MK party, which is led by former president Jacob Zuma, was the leading party in the province with 41.77% (or 56,931 votes).
The ANC followed second with 21.06% (or 28,699 votes), the IFP was third with 17.08% (23,277 votes) of the vote and the DA was a close fourth with 13.46% (18,342 votes) while the EFF was a distant fifth with 2.28% (3,109 votes).
He said, “MK is doing well in KZN; they have surprised me a little bit. But they are not going to do that in other provinces… We are going to do well in Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Eastern Cape, Free State, and we are doing relatively well in the North West.”
“We are going to do relatively well. We are on 42.5% now and I’m still confident we will get over 50% because there are areas we mobilised that have not come in yet.”
He dismissed early projections as well as previous polls and said that “the time for dreaming is over, and the real results were coming in”.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has predicted the final results for the elections, with the elections forecasters projecting a massive 15% drop for the ANC.
The CSIR made its prediction at 8.5% of the votes counted.
In the 2019 elections, their prediction was just 2% off the mark for the major established parties. They explained that projections were difficult for new parties like the MK as they had no data to compare to.
Earlier this morning, Professor Pravesh Debba of the CSIR, said their model was predicting the final votes tally could reflect a 42% tally for the ANC, 22% for the DA, 12.8% for the MK and 9% for the EFF.
By 10am, the CSIR prediction tool still had the ANC steady at 42%, while the DA dropped to 21.% and the EFF was steady at 9%. The MK was being predicted upwards to 14%.
Prof Debba said the projection of the MK could be well overstated by the model due to no previous data to assist the model. He explained the difficulty of new parties, in 2014 for the EFF’s first elections, the model predicted 3-4%, but the EFF secured double at 8.39%.
The CSIR has been predicting elections since 1999, with a high degree of accuracy. The CSIR model makes continuous updates as more data becomes available.