Business Report
*By-elections show little change in status quo* *Donwald Pressly, Business Report, Johannesburg, 30 March 2012*If the by-elections held on Wednesday in 14 wards around the country are anything to go by, sweeping changes are not going to come in the 2014 national elections. The ANC won 13 of them. The wards that were of particular interest were three in the Nelson Mandela metropolitan council area, probably better known as Port Elizabeth.
This was seen as an important contest because the DA and Cope together got 49 percent of the votes in the city in the general municipal election last year, with the ANC snatching a very narrow majority city-wide of 51 percent. The deaths of three ANC ward councillors reduced the party’s council majority to just one.
The DA and Cope stood against each other but Cope fared better than the official opposition, although party leader Helen Zille and parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko have spent much time in the region in recent weeks trying to bolster the party’s performance among black voters.
All three wards were in black township areas. Cope got about 12 percent in one of the polling districts and 7 percent in another, while the DA got about 1.5 percent in the three wards. It actually reflected little change in the support levels of the parties since the municipal elections.
In fact the ANC was marginally up in two wards – from 88.68 percent of the vote to 89.97 percent in one, from 88.94 percent to 89.07 percent in another – and it dropped only slightly from 90.93 percent to 90.77 percent in the third, albeit on substantially reduced voter turnouts.
The ANC also won wards in the Eastern Cape towns of Lady Frere, Mount Fletcher, Mount Ayliff, Mbizana and Ntabankulu easily. Significantly, the ANC won an increased majority in a ward that it won in Saldanha Bay in the Western Cape in a municipality snatched by the DA last year.
Sapa reported ANC Eastern Cape spokesman Mlibo Qoboshiyana as saying that the victory in Nelson Mandela Bay “exhibits the rejection of those who call our people refugees in the land of their birth and the affirmation of the progressive programme of building better communities of the ANC led by President Jacob Zuma”.
This follows a row over Zille’s use of the word “edu refugees” to describe the position of black school children who had fled schools in the Eastern Cape to relocate to the Western Cape. The context of her remarks was the recent racial mini-war between “coloured” pupils and “black” pupils in Grabouw, outside Cape Town, where the DA is in control of the local municipality. Whoever whipped up the unrest – the ANC and DA blame each other – it turned into an ugly business.
The conflict, apparently, was about poor conditions and overcrowding at the “black” school and rejection of the Afrikaans-dominated instruction at the coloured school by a minority of black pupils.
In another municipality which the DA controls in the Western Cape, Bitou, which is better known by its principal town, Plettenberg Bay, there have been ugly scenes of businesses being burnt down. The municipality run by a DA-Cope coalition believes that the attacks on businesses are politically motivated. Their argument is that the area is deliberately being made ungovernable by the ANC, which lost the municipality – by just one seat – last year.
The by-elections did not occur in these hotspots this week, but there can be little doubt that Zille’s remarks had some impact on the results in Nelson Mandela Bay.
The ANC’s grip on the electorate remains strong, despite opposition claims that it is a poor delivery agent to its voters.
*From: http://www.iol.co.za/business/business-news/inside-parliament-1.1266967*
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