Electoral Road Show with Wayne Sussman: By-election devastation for the ANC ends G20 honeymoon

In a “devastating” night for the African National Congress (ANC), the party suffered by-election losses in the Eastern Cape, the Northern Cape, and in KwaZulu-Natal. In this edition of The Electoral Road Show, analyst Wayne Sussman speaks to Chris Steyn about the night’s results: In Mandeni, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MKP) took the ward with over 60% of the vote with the ANC falling from 65% to 30%. In Douglas (Siyancuma), the ANC suffered a shock defeat with its vote share falling from 56% to 25% as an independent took 47% of the vote. In the Kou-Kamma municipality, the ANC lost another ward to the Patriotic Alliance (PA) when it grabbed 44% of the vote, up from 7%. On top of these losses, the ANC also fared poorly in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s home ward, Ward 90 Johannesburg, where the Democratic Alliance (DA) vote share shot up from 70% to 97%, and the ANC’s fell from 11% to 3%. The party was hit with another setback in Gauteng ANC heartland, where its vote share fell from 76% to 49% in Khutsong on the West Rand. It also suffered a big drop in Pellsrus, Jeffreys Bay, from 44% to 25%. And in another slide for the ANC, this time in Makana, formerly Grahamstown - where the ANC had been rock solid - it went down from 67% to 50%. Here, the DA were the big winners, surging from 1% of the vote to 26%. Sussman lays out the various coalition options now open to the ANC.