Pretoria - With more than 12 million votes counted in the early hours of Friday morning, the ruling African National Congress's (ANC) lead was growing slowly, but steadily.
At just after 5:30am on Friday, the ANC had an overwhelming 8 353 774 votes of the over 12 million votes counted.
Results coming in at the Independent Electoral Commission's results centre show the party is also winning the race in eight of the country's provinces.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) is tailing on the leader board nationally with 1 993 162 votes and in third place is the new kid on the block Congress of the People (Cope) with 950 861 votes.
The IFP is in fourth position with 486 203 votes, followed by the UDM with 121 659, while the ID has 114 713 votes.
The Freedom Front Plus has clinched 119 890 votes.
The counting of votes slowed drastically on Friday morning with only 165 205 votes tallied between 12.55 and 3am.
Counting had been completed in only the Eastern Cape, where the ANC won 69.50 percent (1 499 363) of the 2 157 366 votes.
The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has determined that 77.31 percent of the 23.18 million registered voters did cast their ballots in Wednesday's poll.
Meanwhile, counting is expected to be completed by midday today; however, the IEC said it would only announce official results and the voter turnout at the weekend.
