Mail & Guardian Reporters
The Inkatha Freedom Party hardliner Walter Felgate, who defected to the African National Congress this week, had been a trusted member of the ANC’s underground who worked alongside Oliver Tambo and CF Beyers Naude for several years.
Felgate, who was probably Inkatha’s most vocal and energetic negotiator, and a stumbling block at Codesa, said he could no longer tolerate the lack of democracy in the Inkatha Freedom Party.
He claimed he had worked with the ANC before he joined Inkatha, and this was confirmed by impeccable sources who operated in the ANC’s underground structures in the 1960s and 1970s.
When IFP leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi abandoned his support for the ANC, Felgate followed him, breaking with the ANC. For decades, he was intractably opposed to the ANC’s internal wing, the United Democratic Front and then, after 1990, the ANC itself. Felgate’s former wife, Susan, still works for Buthelezi.
At a press conference organised by the KwaZulu-Natal ANC this week, Felgate announced his resignation from the IFP while seated under a banner which read, “Once ANC, always ANC”. He said he had not yet informed Buthelezi about his defection, and saw no need to do so.
He said the final straw which prompted his break with the IFP was the decision by Ben Ngubane to pull out of the KwaZulu-Natal peace process.
Felgate claimed “the chief” – Buthelezi – had rendered the IFP undemocratic, as he took all decisions in the organisation and led the rest of its senior officials “up the garden path”.
He denied that he had been involved in IFP hit-squad activities which are being unveiled in hearings of the truth commission. “I will not be making an amnesty application. What’s coming out now was never discussed in IFP structures,” he claimed.
The ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal secretary, Sipho Gcabashe, said he expected more IFP members to follow Felgate into the ANC.