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Jacob Zuma at the ANC's election party (Themba Hadebe, AP)
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SA Election 2009 Special Report
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INTERACTIVE
Pretoria - The IEC can certainly boast about being impartial - in the smallest of ways.
Speaker of Parliament, Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde staggers to the dining area in the IEC's stadium-sized national results centre on Thursday afternoon, looking for a chair after being on her feet for two hours.
"Sorry we only open at 17:00," the woman on duty declares firmly. It's 16:50. She won't be swayed so we take our seat in a cramped Parliament office, as Mahlangu-Nkabinde takes some time out to answer a few questions from News24.
"People think if there's a two-thirds majority it's over," the senior ANC member notes as the electronic leader boards that dominate the facility reflect the votes coming in steadily. Opposition parties have hoped to keep the monolith ruling party under two-thirds of the vote in this election, but early indications are that they may have failed.
A two-thirds majority will give the party the power to make changes to the Constitution. The ANC was hovering at the 66.7% mark as votes were being counted on Thursday afternoon. It won 69.7% of the vote in 2004.
"I don't think people need to fear anything. We've had a two-thirds majority for a number of years and some of the amendments that came through were things negotiated by the opposition parties themselves."
Fear-mongering
But Politicsweb editor James Myburgh, writing just before election day, pointed out that the party "in 2002 it passed a constitutional amendment to allow floor crossing - something that it did purely to stuff up the opposition", even though the DA did go along with it at the time.
In an article from 1999, republished in the ANC newsletter just before these elections, President Kgalema Motlanthe called opposition parties' obsession with the ANC's two-third majority the new swart gevaar and an attempt at fear-mongering by opposition parties.
"I think some of those checks and balances in the Constitution were brought in by the ANC, and the ANC has made it clear that we worked so hard to get this Constitution through and therefore it is not in the ANC's interest to be amending the Constitution," said Mahlangu-Nkabinde.
But for opposition parties, the real worry is when it is no longer in the party's interest to respect the Constitution.
"I really do think it's in their own interest not to get it because then there's a temptation to be naughty," said Pieter Mulder of the FF+. "If you don't have it you can't change the Constitution, but maybe in four, five years something might pop up and then the temptation would be to change it."
For DA leader Helen Zille the danger is even more imminent. "Of course it's a problem - I mean they've already accepted in Cabinet a bill to reduce the powers of local government. They're doing that because they know the DA is going to win many local authorities in 2011."
The ANC earlier this month denied Zille's allegations.
'Nothing will change'
For Myburgh, the two-thirds majority is no phantom fear. He recalls statements made by Motlanthe in 1999 to the Sunday Times. "What triggered opposition concern at a two-thirds majority for the ANC were statements Motlanthe himself had made to the Sunday Times. The ANC was then in the initial stages of bringing all state organs under party control - including those whose independence was supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution.
"Motlanthe told the newspaper that if the ANC gained a two-thirds majority in 1999 it planned to use it to review the power held by independent watchdog bodies such as the Judicial Services Commission, the auditor general, the attorneys general, and the Reserve Bank."
But 10 years later, Mahlangu-Nkabinde is adamant that nothing will change. "We have been in government as the ANC so there is nothing we want to undo because everything that was done was by us."
- News24
