No voters roll – but plenty of goodwill
The first democratic election was touch and go until six days before the 27 April 1994 poll
The first democratic elections in 1994 were a major logistical and political feat, with nearly 20 million citizens casting their votes together for the first time over three days, beginning on 27 April.
The country had no standing electoral commission, no common home affairs regime and the parties taking part in the poll had been engaged in a civil war in Kwazulu and Natal, which was to claim 20 000 lives by the mid-1990s.
Inkatha, as the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) was known at the time, had boycotted the elections until six days before the actual vote, part of its strategy of brinkmanship which forced constitutional guarantees for the Zulu monarchy in return for its participation.
Until then, the bodies had continued to pile up — 429 people were killed in the province between midmarch 1994 and Inkatha’s decision to participate in the poll — and the fledgling electoral commission was unable to reach many parts of Kwazulu and Natal, which the party had declared no-go areas.
Mawethu Mosery, the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) deputy chief electoral officer, was the head of voter education and monitoring in Kwazulu and Natal — the most heavily contested and most violent part of the country — in 1994.
A lawyer with what was then the University of Natal’s Street Law Project, Mosery was among a number of legal professionals who were seconded — voluntarily — to help run the historic elections.
The Transitional Executive Council, which acted as an interim government ahead of the poll, recruited lawyers, academics and individuals from the religious and NGO sectors to the electoral commission.
The business and banking sectors provided logisticians and business managers to help plan the election and to run the IEC, which faced a massive and daunting task, both logistically and in terms of getting access to prospective voters, because of the political violence.
Staff had to be recruited and trained to run the elections and the counting process, while an entire administration had to be set up from scratch.
“There were no election managers then. We learned to be election managers on the job.
“It was very difficult to get things going,” Mosery recalled this week. “It was even more difficult for those of us involved in voter education, with the murders that were committed in Ndwedwe of voter education staff putting up IEC election posters.”
Eight contractors distributing voter education material for the
Independent Electoral Commission were kidnapped and murdered in the Ndwedwe area weeks before voting day, while three people were killed when ANC campaigners came under attack at Ulundi, the Kwazulu capital.
“A political settlement had not been achieved when we started to prepare for elections.
“Inkatha was out until six days before the voting started. Until they came on board, it made it difficult to know which area you could go to and which you could not,” Mosery said.
Ballot papers had already been printed, without Inkatha on them, so the IEC had to rush to find a solution, coming up with stickers bearing its logo which were added manually before voting day.
The IEC had to play catch-up with voter education in the Inkatha strongholds they had previously been unable to enter.
“It was way too late and we lacked resources and capacity but somehow we managed,” Mosery said. “It was a bit of a headache, a frantic operation, to get it going.”
There was also no common voters’ roll, no mapping capacity and no idea how many people were actually going to come out to vote when the polling stations opened.
Many of the more than 19 million people who did make their crosses had no birth certificates or identification documents. In addition, the IEC had to deal with the fact that voters carried paperwork issued by the central government and all of the homeland administrations.
“Just to prove a person’s identity was very difficult,” Mosery said.
All of these issues resulted in the voting being extended until 29 April, when the counting process finally started.
Moving ballots from the polling booths to the counting centres also had its problems, as did the counting process, with the result in Kwazulunatal disputed by the parties for several days before it was accepted as final by all contestants.
Mosery said that, despite the difficulties, the eventual commitment from all parties that “these elections must happen and that these elections must usher in a new order” had got them over the line.
“There was a lot of good will from citizens, from key stakeholders and from key individuals in the country and a commitment to making sure that the elections took place,” he said.
“Voters were willing to tolerate inefficiencies that were in the system and the process.
“They were ready to tolerate this because it was an election that was ushering in a new order and they were ready to go that route.
“Goodwill basically carried that election and the outcome of that election,” he said.
Margaret Kruger, a former South African Police general who was central to both the peace process in Kwazulu and Natal and the elections, said during the period between 1990 and the poll, “we were very aware that it may not happen”.
“From 1990 onwards, we knew that the ultimate goal was elections. In the period in between, we were dealing with all the violence and to get peace instilled, with a view to having a peaceful election,” Kruger said this week.
“The whole reality of a peaceful election was, in some respects, almost a pipe dream.”
The threat of violence by the white right wing was also constant during the build-up to the polls.
Kruger’s childhood and university friend, Susan Keane, who was an ANC candidate for Gauteng, was one of the three people who were killed by a bomb planted by the Afrikaner Weer-standsbeweging outside the party’s Johannesburg offices on 24 April.
Kruger was on duty at the ANC rally in Durban addressed by Nelson
Mandela on that day when she heard Keane had been killed.
“She was my friend,” she said.
“This is a person you have known since standard eight, and who you were at varsity with, who is now dead and you have to put it aside and focus on securing Madiba.”
Voting day for Kruger was “the most momentous time in South African history”.
It was also “a nightmare”, despite the fact that, by that point, the levels of violence had subsided and there was a general acceptance that the voting would go ahead.
“By voting day, things were pretty much under control. By then, the writing was on the wall and most people had accepted that there was going to be an election and a new government, except for the real wild men,” she said.
But Mandela cast his vote at the Ohlange Institute in Inanda, presenting major security problems because he was travelling to and from the polling station by car.
“Ohlange was a nightmare from a security perspective because he drove there. We couldn’t put him in the police helicopter because he wasn’t the president yet.
“If anything had happened to Madiba the whole country would have burned,” she said.
‘Voters were willing to tolerate inefficiencies in the system and the process ... because it was an election that was ushering in a new order’