The ruling African National Congress closed its election campaign yesterday with an appeal to the white minority to reject the "message of despair" propagated by opposition parties and to vote for it in today's general and provincial elections.
The appeal, in the form of an open letter to whites from the ANC president, Mr Thabo Mbeki, was reported on the front page of the Star yesterday. It was timed to reinforce the impact of a surprise visit by outgoing President Nelson Mandela to a shopping mall serving a predominantly white residential area in Johannesburg, where he exhorted whites not to "marginalise themselves" by voting against the ANC.
Only a minuscule 2 per cent of the white community plans to vote for the ANC, Opinion '99 found in its latest investigation on voting intentions. By contrast, a massive 79 per cent of the black majority community was committed to voting for the ANC.
But, with the decline of the once-powerful National Party, now renamed the New National Party (NNP), whites might well constitute a major proportion of the undecided voters, political analysts reckoned. Although the proportion of uncommitted voters has declined from 20 per cent late last year, they still account for 15 per cent of the potential voters.
In his open letter, Mr Mbeki was at pains to reassure whites that they were free to vote for opposition parties but at the same time he adopted an inclusive tone, encouraging them to feel part of the ANC. "I'm proud and happy to count you among those in our country who made [our] successes possible," he said.
The ANC, whose support level among registered voters intending to vote was found to be a shade under 65 per cent by MarkData in its latest survey, received a boost when Business Day, one of Johannesburg's three main newspapers, declared in its favour in an editorial.
Its decision to switch support from the Democratic Party (DP) to the ANC followed backing for the ANC in the national election from the Star, the Johannesburg-based flagship of Dr Tony O'Reilly's Independent Newspapers. The smaller but influential Mail and Guardian similarly urged its readers to vote for the ANC.
The shift in editorial direction by Business Day and the Star had serious implications for the fragmented opposition parties, particularly the DP, which prides itself on its tough stand against many ANC policies. Seeking to oust the NNP as the official opposition, the DP was left without the backing of a major newspaper in the megalopolis centred on Johannesburg and the cluster of smaller cities and towns around it.
To compound its problems the DP was yesterday locked in a dispute with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) after accusing the public broadcaster of being wilfully biased against it.
The DP cited an SABC guideline document to its reporters which said of the party: "Its campaign has basically made it unacceptable to the majority of black voters."
Charging that the DP strategy of recruiting disgruntled former supporters of the NNP and urging the electorate to "fight back" was "an unacceptably high price to pay for a few seats", the SABC guideline document concluded of the party: "[That] means it has no real future."
The DP leader, Mr Tony Leon, attacked the SABC for marginalising his party in its coverage of the election campaign, pointedly noting that the corporation's constitution committed it to balanced reporting and fair play. The discovery of 1,200 undistributed identity documents in Umtata in the Eastern Cape on the eve of the election once again raised suspicions that they had been withheld to prevent the applicants from voting in the stronghold of Mr Bantu Holomisa's United Democratic Front.
In a bid to pre-empt violence at the polls today 100,000 troops were deployed at strategic centres throughout South Africa. The Safety and Security Minister, Mr Sydney Mufamadi, warned those who had not registered to vote to stay away from polling booths.