Bantu Holomisa, the leader of the United Democratic Movement, has been musing on the election results as MPs turn up to take their seats, find their lockers and get their police passes in Parliament.

He told a gathering at the Cape Town Club on Tuesday that only one party gained in the election – the Democratic Alliance. But he said they did not really gain anything: their vote was almost exactly the same as that gathered by the Democratic Party and the National Party in the election before they combined to form the Alliance.

But every other party performed badly, Holomisa said – including his own, which dropped from six to four MPs. The ANC lost seats, from 279 on 21 April to 264 today. The IFP had 23, today it is 18 and so on.

"The other major trend that has happened, despite overall poor performance by the opposition is that the ANC has lost 10 to 20 percent of its support in eight of the nine provinces," the UDM leader said.

"One thing that is becoming clear," he added, "is that the voters seem to be looking for two strong political parties on the centre stage, but do not quite have the choice on the ballot paper yet.

"Perhaps the voters have been ahead of the political parties for several years now, when they have been arguing in the newspapers and talk shows that we should end the fragmentation of the opposition and build one strong alternative to the ruling party."

Holomisa argued that funding also played a major role in this election campaign.

"This is not merely a handy excuse. For instance it was reported that the ruling party spent about R20-million on one weekend's campaign events!" he said. "That is a vast sum of money. Let me put it in another context to demonstrate exactly how much money that is; it is more than the combined election budgets for the UDM in 1999, 2004 and 2009."

He suggested that in order to reach all communities of South Africa he might have to adopt the same strategy as the ruling party and seek foreign funding.

He asked: why do the poor and marginalised continue to support the ruling party? And he explained that the strategy of not creating jobs for people and making them dependent on grants and food parcels, has worked for the ruling party. "It effectively turns people into voting cattle," he said. "The ruling party resorts to blackmailing people at election time, saying the grants and food won't continue if the ANC is not returned to power.

"This is a strategy to deny people independence, because when you work you are independent, but when you're hungry you depend on the largesse and promises of those in power.

"It is a cruel strategy but it has worked."

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