Ivor Powell
If Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi has a message for voters outside the political hothouse of KwaZulu-Natal, it was largely lost on the electorate of Reiger Park near Boksburg this week.
At the end of proceedings, a youth with a knife scar across his throat, where somebody had evidently tried to slit it, collared me. “There’s no security in this place. They give you stickers, but they don’t check for metal. You could sit there and take him out … bang.”
He paused for a moment, then gave a gangster leer. “I could do it. At least it would be a living. There’s no living in listening to that.” He gestured in the direction of the empty stage where the evidently weary, lost- looking IFP leader had just concluded a notably lacklustre address.
A bizarre and somewhat macabre response, to be sure. But in truth, it was difficult to see where the “living” was in what had gone before.
In Reiger Park the issues are about the survival of a coloured minority in a harsh climate where they feel increasingly marginalised, about jobs where they believe they are being discriminated against. What Buthelezi had offered was a “revolution of goodwill which sets South Africa firmly on the path to a brighter future”.
Despite repeated invocations of “the IFP elephant”, guaranteeing democracy and clean government, clamping down on crime, and so on, the IFP is undoubtedly a party in trouble.
In its KwaZulu-Natal heartland, according to the Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s Opinion 99 poll, support for the governing IFP currently stands at a mere 20% as against the African National Congress’s 38%.
In the light of such cold facts the party has tried in the current campaign to realise a vision it has unsuccessfully essayed in the past: that of establishing itself as a party with a strong and commanding profile on the national stage.
The wisdom of the strategy is questionable. What continues to define and set the IFP apart is nothing more or less than its appeal to a Zulu nationalism. What distinguishes its policies is a federalist approach which is built around the notion of a virtual independence for KwaZulu-Natal; in recent speeches Buthelezi has again revived a notion that had all but fallen into disuse since 1994 – that of the kingdom of KwaZulu as a constitutional monarchy with a strong role built in for traditional authority.
In the heartland such notions can be expected to have a certain emotive appeal. For the 300 residents of Reiger Park and nearby Dawn Park who turned out to hear the IFP leader speak this week, they are not of burning concern.
But here is the rub. The ANC, as the premier party of liberation, has virtually defined the terms of democracy in the new South Africa. Unless political parties are prepared to play into racial fears, as the National Party did in the last election and some are accusing the Democratic Party of doing in this, they will struggle to establish a distinctive voice or project a sense of political urgency – at least on the national stage.
Certainly this has been the case in Buthelezi’s attempts to whip up support in Gauteng. At the end of the 40-minute speech in Reiger Park, it was hard to characterise the IFP position at all except insofar as it promised to do what the ANC was promising to do, only better. And indeed, there was an inescapable sense of going through the motions, as though the impis needed to be brought on, wielding spears and shields, for the event to gain anything like a political focus.
But maybe it’s enough to go through the motions. The best hope for the IFP appears to lie in partnerships with the ANC. While the status of mooted plans to offer Buthelezi a deputy presidency after the election is unclear, it remains highly likely that the ANC will try to draw the IFP into some kind of alliance.
Part of the thinking behind this is rooted in the goal of an African nationalist alliance to guarantee ease of governance in the next term. But the opposite is perhaps more relevant.
With the peace process in tatters in KwaZulu- Natal and the death toll due to political violence in the province frighteningly on the increase as the election looms, it is the threat of conflict that looms larger. Moreover, in recent weeks, dark rumours have come to light of renewed paramilitary training in rural areas of the province and the arming of cadres in advance of the election.
Whether the threat is real or more appropriately viewed as a particularly compelling form of brinkmanship remains to be seen. But even so, the ANC has long adopted the view that the threat of conflict will be best resolved by making concessions to the IFP, bringing it inside the fold … and then hoping it will wither as an independent political entity.
In this context, it is possible that Buthelezi could force concessions for his own party to entrench at least elements of the Zulu kingdom and its traditional authority structures. But with the East Rand hostel war of the early 1990s only a memory, it is unlikely the residents of Reiger Park would care too much about that either.