The official results of last month’s national elections simply don’t add up for Mbalenhle Mthethwa, a loyal supporter of a new political party led by Jacob Zuma, former president of South Africa.
“The elections were neither free nor fair,” he said, echoing the stolen election narrative put forward by Zuma. Mthethwa, a 38-year-old chef, lives in a township near the coastal city of Durban and has been out of work for the past four years.
Zuma, 82, whose nine years as president were marred by accusations of corruption and looting of state coffers, has followed the lead of populist leaders in recent years, especially in the United States and Brazil.
Allegations of vote rigging in other nations have resulted in chaos, and South Africans will get their first look at how things might unfold on Friday, when Zuma’s party, uMkhonto weSizwe, known as MK, vowed to boycott the first session of the new elected Parliament.
The boycott would not prevent Parliament from achieving its goal that day: electing a president and a president. But it would provide a high-profile stage for the party to express its anger.
In fact, Zuma’s party exceeded the expectations of analysts and political rivals: it won almost 15 percent of the vote nationally, making it the third largest party in Parliament, and 45 percent in the Zuma’s home province, KwaZulu-Natal.
Still, Zuma and his supporters claim they won at least two-thirds of the vote, enough to change the nation’s constitution and carry out some of their proposed initiatives, although they have presented no evidence. Those initiatives would include allowing traditional ethnic leaders a role in Parliament and paving the way for Zuma, who is ineligible to serve due to a criminal conviction for refusing to testify before a corruption investigation, to return as president.
Beyond Parliament, Zuma’s supporters have said they will remain disciplined and wait for instructions from him on how to respond to what they see as a system stacked against them.
The latest grievance came on Wednesday night, when a terse four-page decision from the country’s top court dismissed MK’s request to prevent the opening of the parliamentary session.
The party had argued that the new Parliament should not be allowed to meet because the election results were in doubt. But the court said the party waited too long to make its application and had not presented enough evidence to support its case.
MK’s election results were unprecedented for any South African party competing for the first time in national and provincial elections in the post-apartheid era. And it was one of the main reasons why Zuma’s former party, the African National Congress, lost its absolute majority for the first time since it came to power at the end of apartheid in 1994, although it still won more votes than any other party. .
The ANC has invited all political parties to join an alliance to govern the country, and the parties were still negotiating on Thursday with a deadline to reach a deal before Friday’s parliamentary session.
MK, named after the ANC’s armed wing during the fight against apartheid, has rejected the ANC. Mr Zuma’s party says he would not consider associating with the ANC under President Cyril Ramaphosa, his former MP with whom he had a bitter falling out. him after being forced to resign as president in 2018.
The extent to which MK has brought down the ANC is most evident in KwaZulu-Natal communities, including Ms Mthethwa’s township, KwaMakhutha, a ramshackle, mountainous outpost just down a road from a tourist coastal town.
Five years ago, the ANC won Ms Mthethwa’s constituency with 76 per cent of the vote. This year MK won with 75 percent. The MK branch in the area has about 5,000 members, said Ms Mthethwa, who is the branch coordinator, and most of them have defected from the ANC.
Mthethwa said she was not politically active and was not really a fan of Zuma until she heard his message at the MK launch in December. Her community suffers from high unemployment, water shortages, power outages and cratered roads, a reflection of a country that is in dire straits.
“There are certain people, when they speak, they get your attention,” he said, adding that he believed Zuma when he said “this is the party that will save all the people living in South Africa.”
What resonates most in communities like KwaMakhutha is MK’s message of fighting for the country’s black majority, which still faces deep disparities in wealth, land ownership and other economic measures three decades after the end of apartheid. Ms Mthethwa said the best way for the party to endear itself to the community was to essentially be good neighbours.
On Wednesday, at a former animal pharmaceuticals store with an exposed cinder block wall in KwaMakhutha, several MK volunteers folded clothes they had collected to donate to community members whose homes were destroyed by floodwaters. last week. Further down the road, several young people who now support Zuma’s party sat next to an open piece of land where they planned to plant a garden for the community after having cleared it.
“The vision of the MK party is to restore the dignity of black people,” said Sthobela Khuzwayo, 21, who embraced the new party despite belonging to a family of ANC activists.
Having worked as a poll watcher on election day, Mr Khuzwayo also believes his party was robbed. The party is still trying to find ways to challenge the official result, but if it cannot do so, he said, it would be wise to take its 58 seats in the 400-member Parliament.
“No change can happen,” he said, “without our members within Parliament.”