OWN CORRESPONDENT and DENNIS BARNETT, Johannesburg | Monday 8.30am
ELECTIONEERING ahead of Wednesday’s general election wound up on the weekend in a frenzy of party rallies across the country as a two-day moratorium on electioneering kicks in on Monday.
In Cape Town’s Khayelitsha township, two African National Congress supporters were wounded when shots were fired outside a stadium where United Democratic Movement supporters were gathering for their last rally.
The shooting happened during a scuffle between rival ANC and UDM supporters moments before UDM leader Bantu Holomisa and his deputy Roelf Meyer arrived for the rally.
“The ANC are not our enemy and we are not the ANC’s enemy. Our enemy is poverty, starvation and hunger. I appeal to you, don’t fight the ANC,” Holomisa told the crowd. However, he indirectly blamed the ANC for the incident.
“The ANC killed our black brothers in KwaZulu-Natal because they did not observe political tolerance,” he said, referring to feuding between the ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party, which has claimed over 12,000 lives in the province since 1985.
“Imagine if we allow that culture to show its ugly head again — we will tear each other apart,” Holomisa said, as a heavy police presence separated rival supporters.
Mandela, who steps down in June, delivered the same triumphant message to his supporters as five years ago when his election buried apartheid — “Siyanqoba — we are winning”.
Deputy President Thabo Mbeki shed his academic, urbane image to dance on stage with Mandela.
In tense KwaZulu-Natal, campaigning was anything but ordinary, where rival IFP and ANC supporters were separated by hundreds of heavily-armed soldiers and police.
The IFP audaciously opted to stage a mass rally in the ANC stronghold of Umlazi south of Durban.
Carrying traditional Zulu fighting sticks, battle-axes, spears and rawhide shields — and a sprinkling of hidden pistols and AK-47 assault rifles — thousands of IFP supporters marched though the streets singing war chants.
That the rally passed off without incident, however, is a measure of just how far the province has come since the 1994 first all-race election, when such an event would have ended in massive bloodletting.
NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk took his campaign to church, visiting a coloured congregation in the Coloured-dominated Western Cape province.
Democratic Party leader Tony Leon, whose party is vying with the NNP to become the official opposition, told 5000 supporters at a rally in Johannesburg that the DP will convene an anti-ANC opposition “summit” after the election “to draft a blueprint for opposition cooperation.” — AFP