BRYAN PEARSON, Thokoza | Thursday 8.20pm
INKATHA Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi on Thursday launched a blistering attack on the ruling African National Congress, fuelling already-simmering tension following the unearthing of a massive IFP arms cache.
Buthelezi, addressing an election rally in Thokoza east of Johannesburg — once an arena of bloody conflict between the two parties — accused the ANC of jeopardising peace efforts between the two rivals by “trying to drag me into this affair”.
Police were led to the weaponry, uncovered on Monday, by provincial MP Philip Powell, a senior IFP member, who has long been linked to allegations of arms-stashing in KwaZulu-Natal. “It is despicable in the extreme that the ANC would take the opportunity of what Powell did to criticise so harshly the IFP and its leadership, trying to drag me into this affair,” Buthelezi said.
He also hit out at claims that he personally must have known about the cache, saying it is “unacceptable that the ANC would not respect our good faith and goodwill.”
“It is obvious that the acquisition of those weapons was not authorised by the IFP leadership,” Buthelezi said, to murmurs of approval from his followers in Thokoza township.
The ANC, he said to cheers from around 1000 supporters gathered on a dusty field in the heart of Thokoza, is using the discovery of the arms cache to “make political capital out of tragedies of the past.”
Powell said in a statement on Wednesday that the weapons were supplied to the IFP by convicted apartheid police death squad commander Colonel Eugene de Kock just months before the country’s first democratic election in April 1994. ANC leader Thabo Mbeki, poised to succeed Mandela when he steps down on June 16, earlier on Thursday played down the discovery of the cache. “The weapons belonged to the earlier period,” he told reporters while campaigning in the black township of Duduza, about 40km east of Johannesburg. — AFP