fiction
Jeremy Cronin: Crossfire
During the past months there has been kite- flying around the idea of a merger between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party. Peter Mokaba, in the flurry of interventions he made prior to the ANC annual conference in December, punted the idea. The IFP’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi slapped down the proposal, on the grounds that Mokaba was “too junior” to be making a serious offer.
However, fellow IFP Cabinet minister Sipo Mzimela leapt at the idea – rather too warmly. He was rebuked by the rest of the IFP leadership. There have also been cautionary statements from the ANC to say merger talk is premature.
But the idea has not disappeared. Last month, Parks Mankahlana, the presidential representative, writing (he was quick to qualify) as an executive member of the ANC Youth League, penned an extensive article in a Sunday newspaper. Mankahlana passionately argued the case for a merger.
What are we to make of all this? With 1999 around the corner, some of the kite-flying is, I suppose, related to electoral calculations. But beyond the tactical manoeuvres, the debate, provided we approach it honestly, goes to the heart of some crucial questions.
Sadly, some of those advocating a merger from the side of the ANC have been tempted to rewrite Inkatha’s recent history. Inkatha was established, Mankahlana tells us, “to pursue the struggle against apartheid”, at a time when the ANC was banned. Insofar as there was any subsequent conflict with the ANC, this was injected entirely from the outside – “the doctrine of low-intensity war propounded by the military junta of PW Botha”.
Back in 1985, ANC president Oliver Tambo had a very different view. Tambo told the ANC Kabwe conference there had been a failure to mobilise effectively around building Inkatha. “The task therefore fell on Gatsha Buthelezi himself, who built Inkatha as a personal power base far removed from the kind of organisation we had visualised. Gatsha dressed Inkatha in the clothes of the ANC, because he knew that the masses were loyal to the ANC. Later when he thought he had a sufficient base, he also used coercive methods against the people to force them to support Inkatha.”
I am sure Tambo would have accepted that organisations and individuals can change. But if there is to be any sustainable co- operation with the IFP (and there must be), it has to be built on honesty, not historical fiction.
Inkatha has been several different things. If, as Tambo observed, it originally sought to clothe itself in ANC colours, in time it defined itself primarily in opposition to the ANC. When meeting Western politicians, the IFP liked to present itself as a Helmut- Kohl-Does-Ulundi act, a centre-right Western-style party, opposed to sanctions and deeply committed to free-market liberalism.
To woo Raymond Parsons and Natal sugar barons, Zulu ethnicism was dressed up as non-racial federalism, the only counterweight to an impending ANC one-party regime. But, in its deep rural and hostel bases, the glue that held Inkatha together had very little to do with federalism or laissez-faire liberalism.
Mankahlana is right to observe that the IFP’s mass constituency is no different from much of the ANC’s core constituency – the rural black poor and migrant workers. However, it was a constituency that the IFP mobilised on the basis of a narrow ethnic nationalism, through the control and dispensing of bantustan patronage, and (as Tambo noted) by coercion. Obviously, it is a constituency that can be organised around another, nation-building, development programme.
Is the IFP, and its present leadership, capable of moving towards this different trajectory? Or does our best hope lie with the steady erosion of the IFP, as patronage resources dry up, as warlord networks are uncovered, and as democracy reaches into rural areas? Opinion polls show that there is, indeed, a very substantial erosion of IFP support. However, this does not mean the IFP is about to expire.
There are no easy predictions. Recent experience with many elected IFP representatives suggests there are possibilities of co-operation between the IFP and ANC. This is especially the case where the desperate needs of a shared constituency come into play – water, health, education.
On the other hand, the IFP will continue to be convulsed by the contradictory pull of its self-interested ex-bantustan elite. It is a stratum that represents (to evoke Mahmood Mamdani’s memorable phrase) not so much the force of tradition as the tradition of force. The IFP’s future trajectory will depend on the outcome of its own internal dynamics, and also on how external forces, not least the ANC, are able to engage with its better instincts.
Talk of a merger is clearly premature. The priority needs to be the consolidation of peace in KwaZulu-Natal. Peace will help to release energies for co-operation around development, and, then … who knows?
Over the longer term, the parties may start to converge on the basis of a principled and progressive programme (and an honest understanding of the past). We should, however, avoid the impression that it is either war or merger. There very many ways in which parties can work together constructively.
If advocates of a hasty merger have cut corners, I am even less impressed with certain arguments against a merger. A merger, we are told, would be a threat to multi-party democracy. It might, and this needs to be thought about carefully. But those who are most loudly whingeing, about a resultant reduction in electoral choices, are often those most complacent about other, anti-choice realities in our country.
Our present multi-party dispensation is one of the institutionalised arrangements we have developed, since 1994, to manage and negotiate the tension between a transformation agenda and the persisting powers of significant elites from the apartheid past.
The National Assembly reflects, in its way, this particular dynamic balance of forces. Besides the ANC, most of the other parliamentary parties represent real constituencies, whose numbers are limited, but whose powers are substantial.
The Democratic Party, the National Party, the Freedom Front and the IFP (in its complex way) all speak for old elites, defending ill-begotten powers and privileges in the face of a transformation agenda. (The Pan Africanist Congress is a different case again: wild libido of the liberation movement, it has lived since 1959 without plan or strategy, but in the hope that the ANC will some day lose its constituency.)
Yes, multi-partyism can be an important means to ensure a ruling party is held accountable. But it is not the only means. In the past few years, social movements, a campaigning press and robust democracy within the ANC and its alliance have been more effective in fostering answerability than the efforts of Tony Leon and Marthinus van Schalkwyk.
Multi-partyism is not a timeless formula to be foisted abstractly on to a social reality. In South Africa today, vast numbers of the historically oppressed remain unemployed, unsheltered, unskilled, semi- skilled and under-nourished. What they do have is numbers, organisation and the possibility, in being a political majority, of sustaining ongoing transformation.
To call for the electoral splintering of the ANC along more “conventional” ideological lines, or to howl at any mention of an ANC- IFP merger in the name of plurality of choice, might seem reasonable. But, as long as three-quarters of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is controlled by five interlocking conglomerates, this free-choice argument is, intentionally or otherwise, disingenuous.