South Africans Begin Voting

JOHANNESBURG, April 22 -- South Africans lined up before dawn Wednesday to cast ballots in a general election that the ruling African National Congress is expected to win in a landslide, despite new opposition that has made the poll the most contested since the nation's 1994 transition to black majority rule.

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South Africans Begin Voting
In Focus: S. African Elections
Swathed in scarves and blankets to ward off the morning chill, voters in posh mixed-race suburbs and poor black townships said it was worth waiting -- sometimes for hours -- to have their say in the nation's fourth democratic elections. Among those casting ballots was the nation's first black president, Nelson Mandela, 90, who voted in a Johannesburg suburb as a cheering crowd looked on.

Elections officials said South Africa's voting population was more energized than ever and predicted a turnout as high as 80 percent.

A victory for the ANC, which has led South Africa since liberating it from white rule and won nearly 70 percent of the vote in 2004, would enable the party to install its controversial but popular leader, Jacob Zuma, as president. But the party faces growing disenchantment among a population frustrated with poverty, crime and corruption, and the loss of even a few points could weaken its dominance in parliament.

Opinion polls released this week predict that 67 percent of South Africans will vote for the ruling party. That would preserve its dominance for another five years -- a prospect that has some here asking whether this beacon of democracy is becoming a one-party state.

The presidential candidate for the Congress of the People, the new opposition party, said last week that long-lived ruling parties in other African nations have "virtually turned into dictators" and that South Africa seemed headed down that perilous path. Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party, has exhorted voters to prevent South Africa from becoming "a failed one-party state."



Zuma casts aside such qualms. He has been barnstorming the nation, urging voters to give the ruling party an even greater mandate.

"There is nothing in the constitution that says a massive majority for the ruling party is bad for democracy," he told supporters Sunday at a rally where he sat beside liberation icon Nelson Mandela. "Especially a party that has a track record of upholding the constitution like the ANC!"

Among those who will vote for Zuma's party is Peter Dlhamini, a 61-year-old carpet installer who, 15 years after democracy, still lives in a shack on land that is not his. His toilet is a pit in the ground, and his television is not plugged into an outlet -- there is none -- but hooked up to a generator.

The ANC has done too little, Dlhamini said. But the party still has his vote.

"They started this problem," he said at his home in Thembelihle, a squatter settlement south of Johannesburg. "They have to solve it."

Defectors to the new opposition party, an ANC splinter group known as COPE, accuse the ruling party of stifling dissent. The Democratic Alliance says the ANC-dominated Parliament has abused its power to dismantle a crime-fighting unit that investigated Zuma for corruption, fire a top prosecutor who was unwilling to drop charges against Zuma and strong-arm remaining prosecutors into scrapping the case. LINK...