Central government relies on press clippings for intelligence. ANC regional leadership is in a shambles. The IFP is torn by internal disputes. Eddie Koch reports with Paul Stober and Marion Edmonds
It is a drizzling Wednesday night on Durban’s beachfront and there is a machine at the amusement park called The Octopus, which uses a powerful electric turbine to twirl its occupants around in plastic cubicles which spin at great speed on the end of a set of gyrating mechanical tentacles.
The contraption, its screaming riders watched by a group of onlookers who appear to be mesmerised by the perpetual motion, is a metaphor for the province that surrounds it. KwaZulu-Natal is whirling into what the Human Rights Commission (HRC) describes as a “situation of near anarchy”, and the politicians at the control panel are unable to find the stop button.
Other images from the same rainy night on the esplanade describe the effects of the centrifugal forces that are ripping through the region.
On the pavement next to the funfair lie some bodies wrapped in black plastic. They look like those bags that police take murder victims away in, but it is just a mother and her children, some of the province’s estimated 500 000 internal refugees, who sleep in the crevices of the city at night, their villages in the countryside destroyed.
One block away a van without number plates pulls up outside a fast food complex called The Bazaar. Out get two drunk men with their girlfriends. One has a .45 on his hip. The other takes an automatic rifle from under the seat of the vehicle, folds back the stock, and asks one of the women to hide it under her jacket before they walk off into the night.
A new regional dialect is emerging to describe people like this, who so brazenly stalk the streets and the villages of KwaZulu-Natal. Last month nearly 100 people were killed in political violence and more than 200 houses were burned down. “The spoos and the sdoos are the single most important cause,” says Linda McLean of the Human Rights Commission.
“Spoos” are the Inkatha Freedom Party’s militias, more formally known as self-protection units (SPUs). Some call them the amafiverandis because residents in Inkatha areas have been forced to pay five rand each for the upkeep of the units. “Sdoos” are ANC-aligned self-defence units (SDUs) some of whose members have formed renegade gangs which terrorise people in areas that were once considered ANC strongholds. And there is a new band of thugs who operate in KwaMashu and Umlazi near Durban, and call themselves the “Akaplas”. They are Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and Azanian Peoples Liberation Army (Apla) dissidents who last year deserted from the national army base in Wallmansthal.
While the acronyms of terror proliferate, there are signs that the country’s political centre cannot keep its problem province from sliding into chaos. At a national level, senior figures in government, including people in the inner circle which advises the president, admit they do not have a coherent strategy for dealing with the spiralling chaos there.
Last month the Safety and Security Ministry launched Operation Jambu. One thousand soldiers and policemen were sent to KwaZulu-Natal and they have, so far, not prevented the death toll from rising. The main reason, says Jenny Irish of the Network of Independent Monitors (NIM), is that the force has been dispersed around 54 flashpoints in the province. In the first three weeks of the operation, 91 illegal weapons were seized and 500 people were arrested. Many of these were illegal immigrants, dagga smokers and drivers under the influence of alcohol.
A basic reason for confusion at national level about what to do with KwaZulu-Natal is a lack of credible information from the state’s official intelligence bureau. It is now well-known that the president has thrown more than one tantrum because his staff are forced to rely on press clippings to shape their policy on the province. Sources in Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Intelligence say the National Intelligence Agency, staffed with hundreds of agents to carry out investigations, has failed to produce a credible report on the one region of the country that provides it with a valid reason to exist.
Meanwhile, the leadership of the Inkatha Freedom Party, which won last year’s provincial elections and is meant to govern the region, is being torn apart by a byzantine set of battles. These conflicts, essentially between moderates in the province and a hardline group of national politicians, revolve around different styles of federalism, but are informed by deeper personal and political agendas.
The party’s pragmatists, including Premier Frank Mdlalose and constitutional negotiator Arthur Konigkramer, favour a moderate set of federal principles which they believe can be negotiated with the African National Congress. The other faction — led by IFP president Mangosuthu Buthelezi, his advisers Mario Ambrosini and Walter Felgate, and Correctional Services Minister Sipo Mzimela — favours an autonomous Zulu kingdom that can be ruled without much interference from the ANC, even though the King himself rejects this prospect.
The conflict in the IFP is so serious that Mdlalose and Konigkramer are said to have already typed out their letters of resignation, while Buthelezi has reportedly adopted a John-Major strategy by threatening in public to step down from his divided party unless its members rally behind him with a fresh mandate to overrule the provincial upstarts. The result: “We are going around and around without making any progress and it’s making us all sick,” says Ina Cronje, an ANC provincial parliamentarian who has been involved in efforts to strike a deal on the province’s constitution with some of her IFP colleagues.
At the same time, there are ominous signs that elements in the IFP are continuing to arm and train the party’s militias — on farms owned by conservative whites and in game reserves controlled by KwaZulu’s old conservation agency — so that low-intensity civil strife can be used to back demands for an autonomous Zulu kingdom (see story at right).
Simultaneously, however, some commanders in Inkatha’s network of SPUs are deeply disgruntled in the wake of revelations by the Sunday Times that at least R5,5- million was taken from provincial funds to pay some of the party militias. A senior SPU commander this week told the Mail & Guardian his men were outraged because they had not received any of these funds. He added that they were “sick and tired” of the “militant” IFP national leadership that is blocking a scheme for them to be integrated as professional soldiers into the national army.
And, as Inkatha’s political and military wings unravel, the KwaZulu-Natal leadership of the African National Congress has shown itself, with some notable exceptions, to be thoroughly ineffective. The movement’s most able leaders have either been killed or have moved into national politics. Rank-and-file members now complain openly that their leader, Jacob Zuma, has failed dismally to give the party direction in the province. And the lack of strong party structures on the ground leaves wide open spaces for the renegades who have joined the Sdoos and the
But, as the machine whirls on, there are signs of forces that can counter its centrifugal effects. Safety and Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi has established the Independent Task Unit (ITU), a crack team of lawyers and detectives, to investigate political murder and mayhem. Their evidence has led to a number of prosecutions, and impending trials will promote a return to law and order in the province.
“The recent conviction and sentencing of operatives of a KwaZulu-IFP hit squad is a welcome development which should send a signal to perpetrators of violence that the days of impunity are drawing to an end. This is the first time that a South African court has recognised the existence of hit squads,” says the HRC report.
Rigorous investigations by the ITU have forced the attorney-general’s office, which has distinguished itself over the past two years by failing to bring prosecutions against the warlords who rule parts of the province, to consider charges against senior political leaders who were implicated in political murders during the hit squad trial. The central government has also ordered all chiefs whose bodyguards were officially issued with G-3 automatic rifles, a common weapon used in political attacks, to return them.
Operation Jambu has, so far, not been a spectacular success. But NIM and a group of non-government organisations have sent a memorandum to Mufamadi with recommendations that could improve its impact.
“What we need is a group of professional detectives (which has been promised as part of the operation) to back up the soldiers and for them to move into one area at a time, mop up the illegal weapons and arrest the people responsible for the violence. This should be followed by rigorous investigations and prosecutions,” says Irish.
Ari Sitas, a poet and professor of sociology at the University of Natal, says he hears the sounds of another force that can brake the cycle of cynicism and violence. They are the distant voices of ordinary people who are fatigued by it all: businessmen who want to make some money and provide jobs in the process; church leaders who have seen their parishes destroyed; lawyers disillusioned by a failed criminal justice system; monitors who do better intelligence work than the NIA with a fraction of the resources; rank-and-file party members who are fed up with a failed leadership; mothers who are tired of putting their children to bed under plastic bags in the rain; spoos who just want a job in the army and a pay packet at the end of every
What the province needs, says Sitas, is a modern prince to lead these disparate groups of people in a march against the warlords who rule much of it. “That is a coherent social movement that will give a voice and a platform to the many voices in civil society who are demanding peace and development, a movement which will put strong popular pressure on the state to ensure that people can go to sleep at night without worrying that someone is coming to burn the house down.”