South Africans go to the polls

South Africans vote in national elections for the third time today a mere decade after the country’s first vote to include all racial groups ended white minority rule.

The turnout in today’s vote may show whether lingering poverty and unemployment, crime, corruption and a devastating Aids epidemic have worn away the sheen on South Africa’s young, multi-racial democracy.

President Thabo Mbeki’s African National Congress (ANC) is poised to retain - or even increase – its sweeping majority in balloting for a new national parliament and provincial assemblies. But political leaders worry that the turnout will drop for the second straight time since the historic 1994 vote.

“Standing on the sidelines, failing to go to the polls, is a neglect of the democratic duty,” Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, told the final major ANC election rally.

Mr Mbeki has highlighted the ANC’s achievements and, in an unusual door-to-door campaign that took him from squalid shacks to comfortable middle-class living rooms, asked supporters to be patient .

Successive ANC governments have built 1.6 million houses, brought clean water to nine million more people and now deliver electricity to 70% of South African homes. The once socialist party has revived an ailing economy and lifted the country from diplomatic isolation to take a leading role in African affairs.

Opponents led by the Democratic Alliance, which is expected to finish a distant second, accuse Mr Mbeki and the ANC of mishandling the country’s Aids crisis, neglecting to crack down on corruption and crime, and failing to create jobs.

An estimated 5.3 million South Africans are infected with HIV, more than in any other country.

Unemployment of more than 30% has hit poorly educated blacks hard. While a new black elite is changing the face of South African suburbs and boardrooms, little has changed for millions in crowded townships and isolated villages and the gap between rich and poor is increasing.

More than 20 million of the 45 million population registered to vote for a 400-member National Assembly, which will then choose a president. Nine provincial assemblies will also be elected today and will in turn select delegates to the 90-member National Council of Provinces, parliament’s second chamber.

In 1994, an unprecedented 19.5 million of the estimated 21.7 million eligible voters cast ballots, waiting in lines up to a mile long. That number dropped to 15.9 million in 1999 – 71% of eligible voters – and analysts say turnout could be still lower this year.

The main concern is apathy among the new generation of voters, too young to remember the brutality of apartheid.

“For these kids, the political struggle is in a sense over,” said Dino Fifas of the Logistix Kids research and marketing company. “Money is now where it is at.”

The ANC has strong support from the 79% black majority and seeks a two-thirds majority in parliament, enough to amend the constitution. It barely missed the threshold last time.

It also seeks to overtake the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu-Natal and the former ruling New National Party in Western Cape, the two provinces it does not control.

Inkatha was the ANC’s chief black rival during clashes under apartheid, and KwaZulu-Natal was the site of minor skirmishes that were the only violence of the election campaign.

Police are deploying 20,000 officers there for the vote.