The EFF has not won any of the 40 wards it was banking on in Tshwane outright, its mayoral candidate Omphile Maotwe has admitted.
Maotwe, who is also the EFF’s treasurer-general, said the party had improved its numbers in those wards but had not taken any of them.
“We’ve got the 40 best-performing wards that showed growth from 2021 to 2024. They are not yet captured on the screen, but our party agents have been sending us the result slips, and today we did fairly well. We haven’t had a single ward that we won outright, but we’ve improved our numbers compared to the last elections,” Maotwe said.
She was speaking at the Results Operations Centre (ROC) on Thursday, 5 November.
On election day, Maotwe had said those 40 wards showed exceptional performance during the campaign.
Early results put the EFF at about 7% in Tshwane, down from 10.7% in 2021.
With 78 of the metro’s 796 voting districts counted, the EFF was fourth on 7.4% of the ward vote, behind the ANC, ActionSA and the DA.
Maotwe said the figure would rise once township results came in.
“It’s early stages. There’s only about 36% counted so far, and once again it’s those small voting districts in suburban areas. The voting districts of the African strongholds have not yet come in in their numbers. So we are hopeful that will increase that number, to at least meet where we were in 2021,” she said.
She insisted the EFF was growing, while the ANC and DA were falling.
“The EFF is growing. Countrywide, we’ve scored more wards than we did in the previous elections. Of course the big parties are falling. You see the decline of the ANC, the decline of the DA, and we are on the rise, so far, with what has been counted,” Maotwe said.
Told the DA would dispute that it was declining, she said: “Their numbers will speak for themselves. You know the 2021 results, and in 2026 you’ll see the results also. So if they disagree with it, no problem. Let the numbers on the screen speak for themselves. The DA is not growing. That’s the narrative they’ve always been driving, even in 2024, that they are growing, but they are not. They lost lots of votes, by the way.”
Maotwe blamed new parties for splitting the black vote.
“We need to guard against fragmentation of the vote, because black votes are fragmented. A lot of political parties, particularly black political parties, are being formed. When you look at the narrative of all these political parties, it’s to say we need to defeat the EFF. The EFF has never been government.
“Instead of saying let’s defeat the people who have not brought service delivery to our people, everybody is just putting their eyes on trying to destroy the EFF, and that fragments the black vote. You’ll see the rise of, for example, the Democratic Alliance, even in townships. How is it possible that they have such inroads in our traditional strongholds, the township wards? But the turnout was low, very low,” she said.
The figures point the other way. The IEC said on Thursday morning that 15.9 million people had voted, already more than the roughly 12.3 million who voted in 2021.
The CSIR projects national turnout of about 52%, which is higher than in 2021. Turnout in Tshwane stood at about 50% in early counts.
Maotwe repeated the EFF’s call for automatic voter registration, synchronised elections and a trade-free election day.
“If you look at countries where you’ve got automatic voter registration, like Denmark, you will see that the turnout there is always over 80%. Our turnout is low because our people don’t really get the hype of elections until the day.
“The last part, which is very important to our people, is a trade-free day. People can get double the salary they earn, so they take that opportunity to score some more money, and they don’t show up at the polls,” she said.
Election day, 4 November, was declared a public holiday under the Public Holidays Act. Under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, employees who work on a public holiday are entitled to at least double pay.
The EFF’s national vote share fell from about 10% in 2019 to 9.5% in the 2024 general election.