If I were an ANC official, I’d be worried

Fun fact: the polling station with the biggest number of registered voters is ... the South African high commission in London, just off Trafalgar Square and close to the great big lions.

The lions — which sit like boerboels and not big cats — may be less of a stone-faced reminder of home to the 24,000 South Africans who can vote here than the braai smoke, the flags and the people singing Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.

And so they came, in their tens of thousands, to vote at 111 voting stations around the world.

By the time the last stragglers had left their marks and the high commissions and embassies had shut their doors, more than 78,000 citizens of the Lucky Country had voted.

That may be a record, and one that the governing party — or any of us, for that matter — shouldn’t really be pleased about.

Almost every voter interviewed for the SABC in London said “we’re voting today because we need to see changes”.

Whoops. The last time people said that it was April 1994 and people were queuing for hours and voting to dispatch an evil and corrupt regime to the smoking rubbish heap of history.

Here we go again, then, though it’s unlikely that the ANC’s epitaph will read “X marks the spot”, at least not this year (2029 is likely to be an altogether different beast, however).

Such is the dystopia of the ruling party that its officials appear unable to grasp that the big turnout is because, well, the voters want them, er, turned out.

Every empire carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Plenty of those seeds have flowered in three decades and the fruit is rotten.

So rotten that even the taste of what a UK news reporter called a “borra voss” roll can’t quite hide it.