Majority in SA says Zuma must go – poll
AN OVERWHELMING majority of South Africans believes that President Jacob Zuma should step down as ANC president and as president of the country.
So says a poll conducted by Citizen Surveys in April, May and June, taking in 1 300 South Africans across the demographic spectrum in both rural and urban areas.
Although the results vary between the nine provinces, most respondents answered No to the question as to whether Zuma should continue at the helm of the country and the ruling party.
In the Northern Cape, 76 percent of respondents wanted him to step down as ANC leader, along with 68 percent in the North West, 61 percent in the Eastern Cape, 60 percent in Mpumalanga, and 59 percent in Limpopo and Gauteng.
In the Western Cape, the figure was 76 percent, along with 49 percent in the Free State and 38 percent in KwaZulu-Natal.
The response to the question of whether Zuma should step down as president is equally damning: 77 percent of Northern Cape respondents, followed by 74 percent in the Western Cape, 62 percent in Mpumalanga, 60 percent in Gauteng, 52 percent in the Free State, and 40 percent in KwaZulu-Natal.
The results of the survey have emerged as the ANC national executive committee meets this weekend to “interpret the message from voters”.
Party secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has said the NEC will focus primarily on reflecting upon the party’s performance in the local government poll.Citizen Surveys has developed a monthly tracking survey which asks a battery of socio-economic and political attitudinal questions.
The company says the surveys “have been designed as a complex, multi-stage, stratified probability sample, representative of the South African adult population aged 18 years and older”, ensuring that the results are “representative of the views of the population, and that findings can be weighted and projected to the rest of the country”.
The project involved face-to-face interviews, conducted in respondents’ homes, and all results were collated and analysed in an aggregate format to protect the identity and confidentiality of respondents.
Monthly and quarterly weights had been developed, and the sample re-weighted to the latest mid-year population statistics in terms of province, race, gender, age and geographic area type.
The results are extremely reliable, and had a high degree of credibility, according to Professor Cherrel Africa, deputy dean of the economic and management sciences department at the University of the Western Cape: “These survey results, which show a strong preference for President Zuma to step down, both as president of South Africa and as leader of the ruling party, are in line with the results from the latest Afrobarometer study, which showed a dramatic decline in trust in the president.”
Africa says these findings will no doubt be a cause for concern for the ANC as they continue with their post-election reflections.
The surveys show the sentiment that Zuma should step down is strongest in the Western Cape, followed by the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga. The region that least supports that position is KwaZulu-Natal.
The data also did a good job in predicting the electoral results; that is, that ANC support would drop.
About 54 percent of those registered to vote said they would vote for the ANC.