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Police reinforcements are being dispatched to Bergville in KwaZulu-Natal, where protests forced election officials to close four voting stations.
Independent Electoral Commission officials briefing the media on progress with the poll in the province on Wednesday said “service delivery” protesters dug trenches across roads in the Okhahlamba Local Municipality, preventing access to the stations.
However, IEC deputy chief electoral officer Mawethu Mosery said they hoped the stations would be opened later on Wednesday and people would be allowed “as long as it takes” to vote.
The IEC said the local municipality and provincial government had been working hard to fill the trenches.
Voting stations in the Umdoni municipality, on the province’s south coast, were also closed or affected by trench-digging but had since been opened.
Fourteen of the 18 voting stations closed by service delivery protests in the country were in KwaZulu-Natal, officials confirmed at the afternoon briefing.
Of the remaining four, two were in the North West Province, one in Limpopo and one in the Eastern Cape.
SAPS spokesperson Brigadier Jay Naicker said people “got up very early to blockade roads” in various places.
He said five people had been arrested in Bergville and one in Ntuzuma, in eThekwini.
Police struggled to make more arrests because those digging up the roads lived nearby and ran away before they could be caught, said Naicker.
He said police were gearing up for action in the late afternoon or evening, when people who had spent election day merry-making finally set off to vote and sometimes “start to make trouble”.
Ntombifuthi Masinga, IEC provincial election officer, said police reinforcements were being sent to Bergville polling stations “to make sure they are stabilised”.
But on the whole, she said the IEC was happy with the way the elections were going.
She said 99% of stations opened on time.
Although protesters blocked the R103 near Umbumbulu, near Amanzimtoti, early on Wednesday police cleared the road before voting commenced.
In eThekwini, 80 stations opened late because of problems or protests, said Masinga.
These included in the Umbumbulu and Folweni areas in south-west eThekwini, and in KwaMashu, in the north of the metropolis.
The IEC dismissed claims that a polling station had been burnt down in Umbumbulu. Mosery said that it was tyres that had been burnt outside a councillor’s office.
He expressed satisfaction with the way the vote was proceeding nationally.
A polling station in Durban North ran out of ballot papers “but we are sorting that out”, said Mosery, adding there were enough papers for all the voters in the country.
A mix-up with a voters’ roll being delivered to the wrong station delayed things at the Addington Primary School polling station, near Durban’s uShaka Marine World.
A long queue had formed at the school when City Press visited around 8am.
Frustrated would-be voters, many from old age homes in the area, complained about being kept waiting and in the dark about the cause of the delay.
Saroj Naidu (76), a resident of The Association for the Aged Lodge in South Beach, said she had been queuing since 6.45am.
“Some of us have not taken our medicines, to be here early. They are wasting our time … very badly organised,” she said.
Voting finally got under way at about 8.30am, after City Press had left.
The mood was a lot more cheerful in Lamontville, one of Durban’s oldest townships.
A favourite local son, Police Minister Bheki Cele, was there to cast his vote.
Dressed in his trademark Homburg hat, dark suit and ANC scarf, the minister joshed with IEC officials and other voters and took time to pose for photographs with well-wishers.
Cele recalled being arrested in the area long ago for carrying a “little knife” that came to be a much bigger knife by the time he appeared in court.
He briefed the media on the efforts to secure voting stations and clear protesters’ roadblocks to the south of Durban, before leaving for the KwaMashu hostel area, which had been the scene of violence in previous elections.
Also doing the hostel polling station tour was the provincial MEC for transport, community safety and liaison, Mxolisi Kaunda.
City Press caught up with him at Glebelands Hostel in Umlazi.
Scores of people had lost their lives over the past decade in a bloody struggle for control over the leasing of beds at the hostel.
But Kaunda insisted the place was safe since the arrest of a senior police officer linked to the killings.
He was visiting the sprawling complex of flats overlooking the Sapref oil refinery and old Durban airport because it was the biggest polling station in the metro.
A queue of more than 200m snaked up a hill and round a bend to a community hall and three tents where votes were being cast.
