Justice Minister Penuell Maduna denied on Tuesday Inkatha Freedom Party MP Albert Mncwango’s claim that the African National Congress (ANC) leadership had conspired to assassinate IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi during the apartheid years.
During a special debate on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report at a joint sitting of Parliament, Mncwango said President Thabo Mbeki had told the TRC of the assassination plot.
”It is also significant that President Thabo Mbeki admitted before the TRC that the ANC leadership had been involved in plotting the assassination of Buthelezi,” he said.
Replying at the end of the debate, Maduna challenged him to produce evidence to back up his claim.
What Mbeki had said was that the African National Congress leadership had intervened once it became aware that an Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cell was considering such a move.
”Therefore nothing was done to harm (Buthelezi)… we never conspired to kill him,” Maduna said.
In his speech earlier, Mncwango said the TRC had been a ”sensationalist circus of horrors presided over by a weeping clown craving the centre-stage spotlight”.
He called on the House not to ”contaminate itself” by lending credibility to the document.
”The TRC report is a flawed product of a flawed process, conducted with flawed motives,” Mncwango said.
The commission had been mandated to do only three things, namely undertake a truth-finding exercise, administer amnesty and provide reparations.
However, it had ”failed abysmally” to achieve its goal of promoting reconciliation, and its final report was, in fact, a ”major setback on the path to reconciliation”.
On Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s chairmanship of the TRC, Mncwango said Tutu had been inherently biased because of his patronage of the United Democratic Front, one of the ”major participants in the conflicts of the past”.
Maduna also rejected this claim, saying all the TRC commissioners had been appointed by the president at the time, and had included members from various political backgrounds.
On the TRC process itself, Mncwango said the commission had collected its information from self-confessed murderers, who were motivated by a ”desperate need” for amnesty.
He further said the liberation of South Africans would not have occurred without the ”relentless political on-the-ground-work of Inkatha, and the efforts of its leader, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi”. – Sapa