Roundup: South African local elections kick off with high gear

The 2016 municipal elections kicked off on Wednesday, with polling stations, except for a very few, around the country officially opened.

With 26.3 million registered voters due to cast their ballots at 22,612 voting stations countrywide, this election promises to attract one of the highest voter turnout numbers since democracy.

Major political parties all expressed confidence that they would win the elections.

Members of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) including the organization's leadership were out on the streets in major cities, making door-to-door visits to encourage citizens to go out and vote.

The ANC reaffirms its confidence in the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to oversee a peaceful, legitimate, free and fair and incident-free election, ANC national spokesperson Zizi Kodwa said.

"The ANC joins South Africans in calling for a peaceful election and urges all our members and structures to actively play their part in ensuring the election takes place incident-free.

"The ANC further calls on its members who will be voting in areas where there have been high levels of political tension, to exercise tolerance and restraint, even in the face of provocation," he said.

All South Africans and first time voters in particular should exercise their hard-won right to vote, Kodwa said.

"Participatory democracy is inextricably linked to people's power, a principle the ANC continues to advance," he said.

President Jacob Zuma cast his vote at the Ntolwane Primary School in his native place of Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal Province.

On Tuesday, Zuma visited the IEC Results Center in Pretoria and expressed confidence that polling would take place under strictly regulated conditions being administered by the IEC.

Voting went on peacefully around the country, with no report of major incidents, the IEC said.

At a polling station in Century City, Cape Town, voters began arriving early in the morning. More than 100 people were waiting in a long que, under the watchful of police.

Emerging from a voting booth at the voting station, Babacar Gouden, a construction worker in his 30s, said he had cast his vote for a "clean" party which would put people first, refusing to give its name.

The City of Cape Town is under the control of the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), but the African National Congress (ANC) has vowed to take over Cape Town from the DA.

The elections were seen by many as being the most contested since 1994. For the first time in history, this election saw 200 political parties and over 61,000 candidates participating.

The parties are contesting 4,392 wards in all 213 municipalities.

The ANC, haunted by a series of corruption scandals,would probably lose control of major metropolitans like Johannesburg, Pretoria and Nelson Mandela Bay.

About 2,000 SA National Defence Force members have been deployed to help the SA Police Service in all nine provinces during the municipal elections, marred by violence that has claimed the lives of at least 25 people, 14 of them candidates fielded by political parties.

The soldiers would be on duty until August 10.

"Security will remain highly visible, to ensure that no one is prevented from exercising their hard won democratic right of voting or participating in any political process leading to the elections," Zuma said before the elections. Endit