While party leaders in KwaZulu-Natal step up the rhetoric and war-talk ahead of the elections, communities on the ground are increasingly refusing to be used as cannon-fodder in political ”turf” wars.
Eight people have been killed in clashes between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress in KwaZulu-Natal in the past month, sparking fears of renewed violence in the province where political rivalry between the two parties left about 20 000 dead in the decade ending in 1996.
On Tuesday hundreds of South African National Defence Force members were deployed in provincial hot spots — Ulundi, Nongoma, Mahlabathini, Estcourt, Tongaat and Greytown — in an effort to prevent violence.
But this attempt to keep the peace has not been helped by the rhetoric and finger-pointing of the supposedly senior political leaders of the province.
ANC safety and security spokesperson in KwaZulu-Natal Bheki Cele said: ”The trend seems to be that wherever there are political blockages and incidents of violence, it is the IFP who [incite] the ANC. Sometimes it is difficult to respect the Amakhosi [traditional leaders] because, to me, they often behave like nothing more than IFP activists.”
The province’s IFP spokesperson Blessed Gwala shot back: ”The most recent acts of violence have been caused by the ANC, who are attempting to discredit the IFP in the eyes of the public. All I can say is that the relationship between the ANC and the IFP is at the lowest it has been since 1999. If you come to the legislature in Pietermaritzburg, you will see that there is no peace in this province.”
And Alfred Mbontshane, IFP representative in the provincial legislature, said: ”That greatest man, Mao Zedong, said that whenever you send your soldiers to war, you don’t send them with the aim of losing. That is all we are telling our people, we just hope that the ANC is going to accept that victory because that victory is assured.”
But on the ground across the province, local communities appear to be tired of the sometimes deadly politicking and the lack of delivery of better living standards by the IFP-dominated provincial and the ANC-controlled national governments.
Ulundi, an IFP stronghold, has been marked with a red flag by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) as a potential site of violence. But people in this hilly village couldn’t be more averse, even angered, by talk of violence ahead of the election. ”I am just waiting for the voting day, I don’t want to hear anything about violence any more because we are the poorest church [mice] here,” said Mamkhize Buthelezi, an Ulundi resident.
Gerty Magwza, an IFP councillor in Ulundi, said that provincial politics has become a game of smoke and mirrors: ”Whenever people talk aboutKwaZulu-Natal they talk about us as if we are violent people. By creating these perceptions, they are really the violators. Whether we are ANC or IFP supporters, we … all live in shacks, we all suffer from HIV/Aids and we all suffer from shortages of water and electricity.”
People have shown a ”paradigm shift from the violence 10 years ago to wanting a dignified and peaceful election this year”, said Mzwakhe Sithebe, an ANC councillor in the Umzinyathi district in the northern part of the province. But he added that he was worried that ”IFP warlords” might try and stamp their authority on the region ahead of the elections.
Kiru Naidoo, a political scientist at the Durban Institute of Technology, said there has been an ”unfortunate tendency” by the media and politicians to ”ascribe random acts of tension to political issues when, in fact, these could have been caused by a family or clan feud. The manner in which these issues have come into the political domain has heightened the political temperature.”
The ANC and the IFP are in a neck-and-neck tussle for control of the province. Although they are both represented in the IFP-dominated provincial government, relations between the two have deteriorated since the ANC became the largest party in the provincial legislature — through defections from other parties represented in the house — technically giving it the right to more seats in the provincial cabinet.
The IFP responded to this by entering into a coalition with the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition in the National Assembly. In the province both the IFP and the ANC have made it clear they want to win the KwaZulu-Natal vote in the coming elections.
A December 2003 poll by the Human Sciences Research Council predicted that the ANC would take 46,6% of the province’s vote, the IFP 33,9% and the DA 6,6%. However, the IFP traditionally under-polls in pre-election voter-support surveys.
IEC electoral officer for the province Mawethu Mosery said the outcome of the election will depend largely on voter turnout and, more specifically, on rural versus urban turnout. He says that rural constituencies are largely IFP and urban constituencies are ANC. About four million people have registered in the province. Of these about 2,1-million are urban and 1,9-million are rural, according to Mosery.
Naidoo believes that a hung legislature is likely, with a coalition of one of the big parties and some of the smaller parties ruling the province. However, he does not rule out the ANC and the IFP continuing to work together in the province. ”Even if the IFP were in full control of this legislature, being in the national Cabinet is what gives it visibility on the national and international stage,” he explains. To try and secure seats in the Cabinet, the IFP might make a deal to work with ANC in the province, even if it wins the KwaZulu-Natal election.
For now, however, the internecine politicking in the halls of power should be of greater concern than the rumblings of political violence on the ground. The people of KwaZulu-Natal appear not as easily stirred to violence as they were 10 years ago.