MK Party president Jacob Zuma speaks to the media outside the Ntolwane Primary School in Nkandla, northern KwaZulu-Natal.
Image: Screengrab from video: Given Majola / The National
South African political leaders urged voters to participate in the 2026 local government elections after casting their ballots at polling stations across the country on Wednesday.
Speaking to media and supporters outside the Ntolwane Primary School voting station in Nkandla, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party president Jacob Zuma said he was pleased to see that people had turned out to vote.
“The voting went well. We have done what we were supposed to. We are confident that we will do well, as you saw, South Africans are going out in numbers to vote. Indeed, they want the MK Party to lead them.
“Our supporters deem us fit to lead the country, to lead in an orderly manner (with integrity), and eliminate poverty in our country. We are not going back. In the previous election, we were robbed, but we were able to let it go because we are kindhearted. However, we knew that the next election would come. Now that we are here, we don’t know what will happen this time,” Zuma said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his wife Dr Tshepo Motsepe cast their votes at the Hyde Park High School in the City of Johannesburg.
Ramaphosa was asked about the decision by the US to exclude South Africa from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) programme, which will end the country’s preferential duty-free access to the US market. It comes after US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that SA and Rwanda would be excluded from January 1.
President Cyril Ramaphosa voted at the Hyde Park High School in Sandton, Johannesburg.
He told the media that it was a negative move for the country, but that South Africa wasn't the only country affected. He said a number of African countries were excluded from AGOA from time to time for a number of reasons.
“AGOA is a unilateral trade arrangement that the United States decides on doing. And we want to focus more on a bilateral trade agreement, where both parties sit down and negotiate trade rules, trade mechanisms that, in our view, will enforce and reconfirm our own sovereignty, as well as the sovereignty of the United States.”
He added that SA and the US had a lot to offer each other and he preferred that it was done on a negotiated basis.
In Cape Town, DA leader and the city’s current mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis cast his ballot in Edgemead, the suburb where he currently lives. He said the DA securing a majority in the city wasn’t a “sure thing”.
“It's tight in the polls, and so no voter should take it for granted. No voter should take for granted the progress that we have made here in these last five years, and think to themselves that victory is easy or that it is impossible to destroy this progress. Progress takes many years to build up and can be destroyed in an instant.”
Geordin Hill-Lewis cast his vote in the school hall at Edgemead Primary School in Cape Town.
GOOD’s leader, Patricia de Lille, who voted at Pinelands Primary School in Cape Town, said that people were angry, frustrated, and had given up hope.
“But we must remember, if we want to see change, and your problem is with the current municipality, with the current city, then they have been voted in by the people of the city, and the only way is to vote [them) out. We're living in a democracy; there's no other way,” said De Lille.
She said that democracy meant that people could vote for any party of their choice.
Former DA leader Helen Zille, who is running for mayor of Johannesburg, voted at Emmarentia Primary School in Johannesburg.
The MK Party’s first deputy president Duduzane Zuma, who voted at Roseland Primary School in Newlands East, Durban, said the party was concerned by the murder of the party’s regional organiser and PR councillor candidate, Lastborn Shazi.
Shazi was shot dead at his homestead in Umzumbe, on the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) South Coast Monday night.
Zuma said it was the 15th party member who had been killed. He “implored” the various units tasked with investigating political killings “to do more” to get to the bottom of the killings.