All opinion polls for the last 12 months have shown that the ANC is close to winning the vital two-thirds majority in the national assembly. If it breaks this barrier, the ANC will be in a position to write the final constitution without requiring the approval of any other party.

However, this majority is not a foregone conclusion. Opinion polls in a country where the vast majority of people have never voted in their lives cannot be reliable.

The vote will be affected by the total voter turnout (the higher the better for the ANC); the number of informal votes; access to polling stations in rural areas, which may be affected by intimidation of farm workers by right-wing farmers; and the effectiveness of the National Party's racist campaign to scare Indian and so-called coloured voters. Years of political violence in the townships, much of it covertly instigated by the state, have made many minority communities nervous.

In KwaZulu/Natal, opinion polls in the past 12 months show ANC support ranging from a low of 45% to a high of 51% and Inkatha's highest as 27%. Levels of intimidation by Inkatha in the rural areas of the province will be crucial to the outcome.

The ANC's biggest challenge is in the Western Cape and Northern Cape, where coloured voters are the majority. Here the NP has mounted a blatantly racist swart gevaar (black danger) campaign. This reached a disgusting low when it issued a comic book that claimed that the ANC's slogan would be, if it became the Western Cape government, “Kill a Coloured, Kill a farmer”.

In the Western Cape, coloured voters are an outright majority, while Africans number only 20%. The NP claims that the ANC's policy of affirmative action will result in coloured people losing their jobs to Africans, and that an ANC government would take coloured people's homes.

The ANC says that in the last weeks of the campaign, the NP's racist tactics have backfired as coloured voters realise they are being manipulated. Nelson Mandela brandished the NP's racist comic during his televised debate with F.W. de Klerk, much to the NP leader's embarrassment.

In the remaining six provinces, the ANC is certain to win government.

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