Zuma gives a speech on January 11, 2014 at the Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit during the launch of the ruling ANC party’s election manifesto/AFP
The election – South Africa’s fifth since apartheid ended in 1994 – will be the first in which “born free” citizens can cast their ballot. They could make up as much as one fifth of the electorate.
It will also be the first election since the death of Nelson Mandela, the nation’s founding father, first democratically elected president and the ANC’s talismanic leader.
“These are historic elections as they take place during the 20th anniversary of our freedom from apartheid bondage,” Zuma said, foreshadowing a campaign likely to lean heavily on the ANC’s past glories.
Zuma said the vote would “consolidate the democracy and freedom that we worked so hard to achieve, and for which esteemed South Africans such as former president Nelson Mandela sacrificed life’s comforts for.”
The ANC is the strong favourite to win a majority of the 400 seats in parliament and so to return Zuma, now 71, to the presidency.
It has won each of the last four elections by a landslide, winning more than 60 percent of the popular vote.
But the party’s reputation has been sullied by pervasive inequality, joblessness, cronyism, corruption and government incompetence.
And this time round the ANC faces a phalanx of opposition parties – from the centrist Democratic Alliance to the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters of Julius Malema – who have fastened on to widespread popular unease.
Zuma himself heads into the election with his own standing significantly reduced.
He has been beset by a litany of scandals, crowned by the revelation that $20 million of taxpayers’ money was used to refurbish his rural homestead.
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