When it was announced twenty-two years ago that the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania got one percent of the votes which translated into five parliamentary seats, I did not believe it. I was in Canada, thousands of kilometres away. Anybody who believed that the PAC received one percent of the votes cast in the 1994 general elections can believe anything.

Let me substantiate why I am saying the PAC could not have garnered a mere one percent of the votes cast in 1994. The news about the popularity of the PAC and APLA was ubiquitous in the tendentious and hostile western media. The western media reported at the time that there was graffiti about the PAC in all the black townships. In March 1994 the New York Times reported that the PAC was neck to neck with the ANC. If that was the case, how did the PAC receive a mere one percent of the votes the following month? I am also aware that the local media also reported a survey that showed that the PAC was popular than the ANC. I have a paper clip from the Citizen newspaper about the same story.

One of my neighbours has told me about an article in a magazine which reveals that the PAC had won the 1994 elections but was swindled by the West because they did not like the policies of the PAC and decided to install the ANC as the governing party. My neighbour does not remember what the magazine is called. I requested him to give me the magazine and he told me he had lent it to the father of one of the popular musicians from my township of Kagiso. I approached the man and he told me he would look for it. When next I asked him, he said he couldn't find it.

My neighbour is not afraid to tell anybody what he told me about what he had read in that magazine - that the PAC had won the 1994 elections but was swindled by the West. Obviously, the West worked in cahoots with the ANC and NP leadership. This means the PAC leadership of the time was in deep slumber, looked the other way, acquiesced or played ball.

In his book The Last Trek, F. W. De Klerk writes that the ANC stole the 1994 elections because some of the ballot boxes were stuffed. He said he wanted to take the matter to court but was discouraged by the then Chairperson of the IEC, Judge Johan Kriegler whose deputy was former PAC deputy President Judge Dikgang Moseneke who is now Deputy Chief Justice and is about to retire in the next two months. Why did the PAC leadership not think of taking the matter to court? It should be noted that this happened about three years after the deaths of Jafta Masemola and Zeph Mothopeng. Were they alive, they would not have allowed this broad daylight swindling to see the light of day. Who benefited from the deaths of Masemola and Mothopeng? Kriegler is now in the forefront of Freedom Under Law.

There are media reports that De Klerk once told an audience in Holland that one million votes were stolen for one man and for one party during the 1994 elections. I leave you to guess who that one person was and which party he belonged to. If those votes were cast, from which party were they stolen? I also leave you to guess.

In the 1994 elections, there was no voters’ roll so it was easy to rig the elections. Former National Director of Public Prosecutions, Vusi Pikoli once asked me for "factual basis for my assertion" in a Mail & Guardian tweet after I had written that the ANC rigged the 1994 elections. I neither had a twitter account nor did I know how to use twitter at the time. I mean if a former National Director of Public Prosecutions did not know that the ANC rigged the 1994 elections, then heaven help us all!

ANC Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe was recently quoted as having said that the West wants regime change in this country. The West neither responded nor denied the allegations by Mantashe.  It was the EFF that jumped to the West's defence. Does Mantashe's statement have some truth? Of Course it does. Mantashe knows very well that the ANC was installed by the West the way some of the ruling elite in the West want to install the EFF or are using them to scare the ANC elite to toe the line. (See report from Vice Media below). Consequently, they can remove them the way they brought them in. But why would the EFF defend the West which they not so long ago criticised in the form of white monopoly capital until their late last year trip to London?

The EFF gets support from some quarters in London. Do the readers still remember their leader's address to the Royal Institute of International Affairs the contents of which the public has no knowledge of?  If by white monopoly capital the EFF excludes the Anglo-American empire then they have no clue where this country's problems stem from - or they know but just look away. What happened, for example, to a month's ultimatum they gave the South African Reserve Bank? Their policies are being watered down gradually.

Does anybody still remember how many voters the IEC estimated there were in the 1994 elections? About eighteen million. However, the ANC declared itself the winner after only two million votes were said to have been counted and Nelson Mandela was seen on stage dancing celebrating "ANC victory." The secret of the Illuminati is that if you assume the position of power, people soon give it to you and they seemed to have shared it with Mandela and now with the EFF. It is probably why their leader said recently that if they can lose or are cheated in the elections, they will remove the government by force of arms.

We know that the ANC has swindled the PAC in the past and continues to do so to the extent of using state organs to destabilise the PAC. However, experience has shown that it is dangerous to discredit the outcomes of election results before they even take place by threatening to wage war when the results are not in your party's favour because a loss can turn violent by supporters of an aggrieved party even if it might have lost fair and square. Such sabre-rattling is a recipe for disaster.

Granted that the EFF's utterances might be reckless, however, such utterances put the IEC's credibility on the line. The IEC needs to redeem itself and not be viewed as a poodle of the ANC government. Why, for example, has the IEC ignored a court order made thirteen years ago to include addresses in the voters roll? How is it going to restore the trust some members of the PAC like myself have lost in the IEC?

The IEC is funded by the ANC government and he who pays the piper calls the tune. The ANC government or its President appoints IEC personnel mainly Sadtu members and declares election dates. It is responsible for buying IEC equipment including computers, its software and ballot papers, God knows from where, and counts the ballots whose results are fed to the IEC Head Quarters in Centurion from all over the country. This set up is open to corruption and gives grist to the mill of those who believe there is vote rigging.

The ANC government's Demarcation Board should be called the Gerrymandering Board because what it does is gerrymandering. It caused unrest in Vuwani and elsewhere in the country. The ward I reside in, Ward Nine, has been carved up each and every election time. It now looks like the map of Africa after the 1885 Berlin Conference.

Allow the IEC to be truly independent or set up an All Party Electoral Commission since the ANC-controlled IEC cannot perform its functions unfettered.

By Sam Ditshego

The writer can be found on Facebook under my name, readers can still like his Facebook page Harakati - active participation in the struggle and follow or follow him on twitter @samditshego.