MK party (Photo: Gallo Images/Fani Mahuntsi) 
No, it’s not.
But let’s rewind: A video published on TikTok in mid-February purports to show thousands of supporters of former president Jacob Zuma’s MK party flocking the streets wearing green.
That video subsequently racked up hundreds of thousands of views after being shared across social media platforms.
As AfricaCheck has established, the video was actually taken in the Dominican Republic in May 2023. It has nothing whatsoever to do with South Africa, with Jacob Zuma, or with the MK party.
But that video isn’t the only hyperbolic claim that’s being made about the levels of support for the MK party, which was only launched in mid-December 2023.
Two days after its launch, the party claimed on Facebook that it had already attracted one million members joining online within 48 hours. It offered no evidence that this was the case.
On the same day, however, clearly after being met with some scepticism, the MK party Facebook account posted: “For the non-believers, numbers don’t lie” with a web traffic dashboard showing 1,781 visitors per minute to the MK website at that moment in time.
Is it genuine?
There’s no way of knowing if that graphic is genuine. But even if it is, visits to a website do not translate into signed-up party members.
In January, Zuma told supporters in Mpumalanga that his party would “win the elections by a two-thirds majority”.
This clearly isn’t going to happen: there’s no reputable poll currently predicting that any party will win the elections by a two-thirds majority, let alone one which was launched less than six months ahead of the elections.
Since then, there have been a few MK events which have been well-publicised flops — including a “mass activation” by the party in Umhlanga in February, which reportedly drew just 60 supporters.
But this doesn’t actually represent the full picture.
For a start, if you scroll through the party’s Facebook account, you will see photos of MK events that have clearly attracted fairly large crowds, at least in KwaZulu-Natal.
This is not hugely surprising, given that a January 2024 poll found that Jacob Zuma’s popularity in KZN is still as high as 63% among registered voters in that province.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Fact-Check — If you don’t vote, is your vote automatically assigned to the ANC?
But much more significantly, there have been two by-elections so far in KZN where — although voter numbers were small — the MK party made a pretty impressive showing. In its debut by-election in Vryheid in northern KZN, it brought home around 20% of the vote. In its second contestation in Phongolo in February, it took 28% of the vote.
This correlates pretty well with a mid-February poll by the Social Research Foundation, which put the MK party’s support in KZN at around 24%, the vast majority of those votes taken from the ANC.
Analysts extrapolate from this that the party could take around 5% of votes nationally, probably the equivalent of about 20 seats in the National Assembly.
It’s a far cry from the two-thirds majority its supporters keep touting, but it is pretty remarkable for a fledgling party whose only well-known face is Jacob Zuma — and it could be enough to put the party in an interesting negotiating position in the post-election coalition struggles. DM