Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Mmusi Maimane on Friday congratulated African National Congress (ANC) president Cyril Ramaphosa as counting of votes from the sixth general elections draws close to an end.

With the results captured at the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) of South Africa's national results operations centre in Pretoria showing the ANC's firm lead, journalists asked Maimane if he had communicated with Ramaphosa.

He responded: "I'm waiting to speak to him and I will organise that. That's not a problem. I don't have a problem. I believe in contesting elections freely and fairly. He [Ramaphosa] ran a strong campaign as we did, and you know what, I think it's a good culture".

"I will say to him, and I say to him here - firstly Mr Ramaphosa we have serious challenges in this country. You do the things that are right about making sure that citizens are able to create wealth and a market-based economy, that we uphold the Constitution of the Republic, that we continue to build a non-racial South Africa, we eradicate corruption and build a capable state ... you will have my support. If you don't do those things and put the ANC above the people of this country, then I cannot stand for that."

Maimane sent out his congratulations: "I wanna congratulate him, but I also wanna say to the people of this country whoever wins must have the mandate of the people."

The IEC on Friday announced that it had passed the 90 percent mark in respect of the number of voting stations captured.

In a statement, the IEC said that at 10.30am, results from 20 632 of the 22 924 voting stations had been captured. Of these, 18 773 (81.89 percent) had been finalised.

"Leading the way in capturing results was the Northern Cape where results for all 707 voting stations had been captured, followed by the Western Cape (98.6 percent), North West (99.4 percent), Mpumalanga (99 percent), and the Eastern Cape (97.59 percent)," IEC spokesperson Kate Bapela said.

Provinces with the most results still awaiting capture were Gauteng (81.99 percent captured), Limpopo (82 percent), Free State (82.93 percent) and KwaZulu-Natal (83.56 percent).

Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal are among the two most closely contested provinces.

"Of the 13-million votes captured by 10h30, 453,265 (3.47 percent) were special votes and 179,511 (1.37 percent) were spoilt ballots." 

The IEC said that based on the results captured to date, voter turnout was sitting at 65.52 percent nationally, with the highest turnout reported in Gauteng (71.89 percent) and the lowest in Limpopo (58.77 percent).