Nairobi — South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) is projected to lose its parliamentary dominance with tallies from half of the votes cast in Wednesday's election putting it below the 50 per cent threshold required to govern.
Results from 51.9 per cent of votes tallied by the break of dawn on Friday had Cyril Ramaphosa-led ANC leading with 3,034,025 votes (42.34 per cent), followed by the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa's official opposition which registered 1,676,433 (23.39 per cent).
The uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party, led by the immediate former South African President Jacob Zuma, had eclipsed Julius Malema's Economic Freedom party after registering a strong performance in the coastal KwaZulu-Natal province which is Zuma's home region.
National Tally
The early results have raised prospects of a coalition government, the first since ANC swept to power at the end of apartheid in 1994 under Nelson Mandela, the country's first black leader.
A party requires 201 seats in the National Assembly to pick the country's President and form a government. Failure to garner a clear majority will force the ANC to build a coalition to cover the deficit.
The performance could mark ANC's worst fall yet having declined from 62 per cent in 2014 to 57.5 per cent in 2019, a shift that cost it nineteen seats in the National Assembly to settle for 230 even as EFF grew from 25 seats in 2014 to 44 in 2019.
ANC's 2014 performance when Malema's EFF made its debut marked yet another decline from 65 per cent in the 2009 election.
Quota system
The party registered its highest performance in 2004 under Zuma when it won 69.7 per cent of the vote up from 66.4 per cent in 1999, and 62.7 per cent in 1994.
South Africa has a parliamentary system of government where the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) computes seats for parliamentary parties based on a quota system pegged on each party's performance in the national election.
IEC divides the number of valid votes cast by the number of available seats (400) in the National Assembly to determine the number of votes a party needs for a single seat.
A party needed 45,000 votes for a single seat in the House in 2014 and fell to about 44,000 in 2019 after the voter turnout dipped by about 7 per cent.
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Jeremiah Wakaya is a multimedia journalist and Online Editor with a passion for international affairs, constitutional litigation, and governance.
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