ANC claims 'decisive' win in South Africa polls

South Africa's ruling African National Congress yesterday promised a decisive victory in general elections set to hand its popular but controversial leader Jacob Zuma the presidency.
With early returns giving the ANC a 66 percent lead, the party has said it would block off downtown Johannesburg streets around its offices for Zuma to address his supporters in the evening to celebrate victory.
"We are expecting a comfortable win. We will win decisively," ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe told AFP.
The final tally could still be a day away, but the ANC holds a commanding lead over its smaller rivals with millions of supporters putting faith in Zuma despite corruption charges dropped just two weeks ago.
The threat posed by a breakaway group, the Congress of the People (COPE), appeared to have fizzled, with the splinter party formed by supporters of former president and Zuma rival Thabo Mbeki taking about eight percent.
The main opposition Democratic Alliance was hovering at just under 17 percent with results from nearly a third of registered voters called.
The ANC was trailing the opposition only in Western Cape province, the stronghold of the Democratic Alliance.
The main question now was whether the ANC would win another two-thirds majority, which the party has held for five years, allowing it to make changes to the constitution.
"The debate was always whether the ANC was going to get two-thirds or fall below the two-thirds threshold. They were always going to win," Ebrahim Fakir of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa told AFP.
"At this stage the race for second and third, which is what really I think everyone was really watching over the past two days, is far from settled," Fakir said, adding that COPE had not performed as well as expected.
Mantashe said the party was not obsessed with passing the two-thirds mark, saying it was "just another number".
"If we get the two-thirds, that is a bonus. It's not an obsession for the ANC," he said.
A record 23 million people registered to vote at nearly 20,000 polling stations with turnout so heavy that authorities reported ballot shortages and overflowing boxes.
The long lines of voters recalled images of South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became president following the end of apartheid.