South Africa: corruption, crime and jobs top issues as voters go to polls

South Africans began voting on Wednesday in the most competitive election since the end of apartheid, with opinion polls suggesting the African National Congress (ANC) will lose its parliamentary majority after 30 years in government.

Polling stations opened around 7 a.m., with voters queuing at some locations including Hitekani Primary School in the vast township of Soweto near Johannesburg, where President Cyril Ramaphosa was expected to vote later.

Security guard Shivambu Yuza Patric, 48, came straight to the polling station after working a night shift. He said he had not voted in the previous election because he had lost faith in the ANC.

"They do nothing for the people," he said. He said he would decide at the last minute who to vote for but was leaning toward small opposition party ActionSA.

Then led by Nelson Mandela, the ANC swept to power in South Africa's first multi-racial election in 1994 and has won a majority in national elections held every five years since then, though its share of the vote has gradually declined.

If it falls short of 50 per cent this time, the ANC will have to make a deal with one or more smaller parties to govern — uncharted and potentially choppy waters for a young democracy that has so far been utterly dominated by a single party.

The ANC won 57.5 per cent of the vote in the last national election in 2019, its worst result to date and down from a high of nearly 70 per cent of the vote 20 years ago.

"There's a lot of uncertainty with what's going to happen. Are we going to have a coalition?" asked student and first-time-voter Amena Luke, 19, as she waited to cast her ballot at Berario Recreation Centre in Johannesburg.

WATCH | The legacy of South Africa's 1994 election:

The ANC is still on course to win the largest share of the vote, meaning that its leader Ramaphosa is likely to remain president, unless he faces an internal challenge if the party's performance is worse than expected.

Voter dissatisfaction over high rates of unemployment and crime, frequent power blackouts and corruption in party ranks lies behind the ANC's gradual fall from grace.

The unemployment rate has hit 32 per cent, with poverty and joblessness disproportionately affecting the Black majority, who make up 80 per cent of the population of a multiracial country with significant populations of white people, those of Indian descent and those with biracial heritage.

There were 27,494 killings in South Africa in the year to February 2023, compared with 16,213 in 2012-2013. That's a homicide rate of 45 per 100,000 people, compared to 6.3 in the U.S. and 2.25 in Canada.

The nine years of Ramaphosa's predecessor, Jacob Zuma, were defined by what South Africans call "state capture" after an inquiry pointed to systemic corruption in which well-connected business people plundered state resources. The 82-year-old Zuma is legally barred from standing for parliament due to a jail sentence, but has formed a party, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), that could conceivably be part of a coalition government.