South Africa's second-largest opposition party, the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party, said Monday it would challenge in court the outcome of last week's elections, alleging voter fraud.
The IFP maintains that irregularities occurred in both national and provincial elections, but mainly in its stronghold of KwaZulu-Natal, a key electoral battleground for President Thabo Mbeki's African National Congress (ANC).
The party said 347,000 people voted in KwaZulu-Natal even though their names did not appear on the voters' roll.
The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) announced the final results of the elections on Saturday, confirming that the ANC had won close to 70 percent of the vote on the national level, its largest election victory in its decade of power.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the most populous province, the ANC secured 47 percent of the vote, outshining the IFP, which won 37 percent in the eastern province in the general elections held on Wednesday.
The electoral commission said it declared the elections free and fair after rejecting the complaints. It added that the IFP was free to appeal to a higher body, the Electoral Court.
"The IEC totally ignored us and refused to deal with our complaints. We will now approach the Electoral Court to force the IEC to deal with the complaints. The elections are not free and fair until those things have been sorted out," IFP national spokesman Musa Zondi told AFP.
IFP electoral representative John Aulsebrook said the court challenge was expected to be lodged Tuesday.
"It's with our legal team, they were mandated to proceed. I presume the application will be lodged tomorrow (Tuesday)," Aulsebrook said.
The IFP won seven percent of the vote on a national level, one-and-a-half percent down from the 1999 elections.
On the provincial level, last week's polls were a major victory for the ANC, which had garnered only 40 percent in KwaZulu-Natal in the last elections in 1999 while the IFP then won with 42.5 percent.
The ANC is due to hold a meeting of its national working committee Wednesday to discuss the way forward in KwaZulu-Natal, where some 12,000 people were killed in political clashes between ANC and IFP supporters in the run-up to the 1994 elections.
Comments
Comments are closed.