Mbeki’s ‘brutal’ letter to Buthelezi

Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi was deeply angered by an icy letter from President Thabo Mbeki this week informing him of his removal from the national Cabinet and wishing him ”the best in your future endeavours”.

The letter had left the Inkatha leadership no option but to stonewall Mbeki’s offer of deputy ministerial post to two lower-level Inkatha members, a senior IFP official said on Thursday.

After an emergency meeting on Wednesday night, the IFP national council informed Mbeki by letter that the two appointees, national spokesperson Musa Zondi and national MP Vincent Ngema, would not attend Thursday’s swearing-in of the new Cabinet, as discussions between the two parties on a post-election package were still ongoing.

”There was no way we could accept the offer, which was calculated to make us look bad,” the IFP official said.

The letter, received by Buthelezi at 1am on Tuesday this week — a day before Mbeki announced his new executive — reads: ”I intend to approach the Reverend Musa Zondi and Mr Vincent Ngema tomorrow to request them to serve in the national government as deputy ministers. Since they are both IFP members of Parliament, I thought it was appropriate that I should as a matter of common courtesy inform you of this decision before I act on it.

”I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your contribution to the work of our government over the past ten years, and wish you the best in your future endeavours.”

A senior IFP official said it was ”unheard of” that a senior minister with 10 years’ service in government should be sent packing in this cavalier way, and that party ”lieutenants” should be offered government jobs over the heads of their leaders without consultation.

After both previous elections, there was consultation and horse-trading over which IFP members would serve in the Cabinet.

The official suggested Mbeki’s purpose was to ”finish off” the IFP after the party’s poor showing in the national and KwaZulu-Natal elections. The party polled 6,97% nationally and 34,87% in KwaZulu-Natal, losing control of the province to the ANC for the first time.

Zondi was retained in the Deputy Minister of Public Works portfolio. The only Inkatha member to survive from the old executive, he is a prominent member of Inkatha’s pro-ANC wing and is said to favour a merger of the parties.

IFP members expressed particular anger over the offer to Ngema, a relatively unknown backbencher considered a junior member of the party. Ngema was moved from the KwaZulu-Natal legislature to the national Parliament last year, apparently because he was suspected of being a potential defector to the ANC.

The offer of government jobs to the two men is widely seen as a move to drive a wedge between the IFP old guard and younger elements less averse to cooperating with the ruling party.

The ANC has pursued a similar post-election strategy in KwaZulu-Natal, where it unilaterally offered the relatively minor provincial portfolios of public works and social welfare to IFP high-ups Celani Mtetwa and Nyanga Ngubane respectively, after initially agreeing to give the IFP three cabinet posts. The IFP has rejected the offer.

It is understood that the KwaZulu-Natal ANC has insisted that former IFP premier Lionel Mtshali — a strong Buthelezi loyalist and member of the party wing sympathetic to the Democratic Alliance — cannot be considered for a job in the executive.

A senior ANC parliamentarian on Thursday poured cold water over speculation that Buthelezi might be offered the chair of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), describing it as ”absolute nonsense”. The MP pointed out that in terms of the Constitution, the NCOP’s presiding officer had to be a member of the upper chamber, and that Buthelezi had been sworn in as a member of the National Assembly last week.

According to a provisional parliamentary schedule, NCOP members are to be sworn in on May 4.

The Inkatha official suggested Buthelezi might be willing to accept such an offer, given that nothing else was on the table.

However, the official believed it might be ”constitutionally untenable” to appoint a political party leader as NCOP chairperson, as the position demanded strict impartiality.

However, the official suggested a last-minute concession to Buthelezi was still conceivable, and that the Cabinet snub might have been intended to soften him up for a lesser posting.

Mbeki’s decision has surprised pundits. Speculation before Wednesday’s Cabinet announcement was that the president would offer the IFP leader a ministry for the sake of inter-party goodwill.

At the time, senior ANC figures said that although Buthelezi was a diminished giant, he was not yet a spent force and the smart decision would be to throw him a lifeline, at least for the next five years.

One ANC MP expressed concern that the virtual extinction of Inkatha in the national government might spark violence in KwaZulu-Natal, particularly in the run-up to local government elections next year.

However, the relative peace that reigned in the province during the election campaign casts doubt over this prediction. Rank and file IFP members told the Mail & Guardian during the campaign they were war-weary and unwilling to be used as cannon-fodder.

An Inkatha official said the axing of Buthelezi appeared to flow from the growing ill-will between the ANC and the IFP, particularly over the latter’s dalliance with the Democratic Alliance, with which it recently forged a ”Coalition for Change”.

The election campaign saw acrimonious exchanges between Buthelezi and Mbeki, with the ANC leader accusing his Inkatha counterpart of pandering to whites. Buthelezi’s response was to call Mbeki ”a liar”.

There is some speculation that the IFP leader, now 75 and suffering from diabetes, may withdraw from active national politics and retreat to KwaZulu-Natal as chairperson of the province’s House of Traditional Leaders.

This would spell the end of a 50-year political career during which he has been one of South Africa’s best-known and most active black leaders.

However, there can be little doubt that his image as an anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1970s was systematically undermined by the violent struggle between the ANC and IFP in KwaZulu-Natal a decade later and Inkatha’s collaboration with the apartheid security forces, exemplified by the ”Inkathagate scandal”.

The hostel-based violence in Gauteng in the early 1990s, Inkatha’s spoiling role in the run-up to the 1994 elections, and the Truth and Reconcili- ation Commission’s finding that he was a gross human rights violator, further damaged his liberation credentials.

The IFP’s under-performance in the election has been ascribed to relentless demographic change, with rural Zulus moving increasingly to the urban areas, and the youth’s growing disenchantment with IFP traditionalists and hardliners.