Inkatha Freedom Party senior MP Gavin Woods has accused the media of selectively reporting only ”dramatic” sections of a leaked document penned by himself.
”In recent days a discussion document, prepared by me for internal debate within the Inkatha Freedom Party, has somehow found its way into the hands of the media,” Woods said on Thursday.
He expressed his regret at this invasion of privacy of a political party, particularly when it concerns matters of an internal nature.
”Worse still, I am shocked at how the document has been represented by some members of the media corps,” he said.
While the paper considers a range of problems in the party — from Woods’s own perspective — the main thrust of the paper proposes discussions around possible ways in which the IFP could re-emerge as a stronger and more influential political player in South Africa’s multiparty democracy. The paper was intended to stimulate discussion.
Certain media reports have cherry-picked the paper’s more dramatic observations, particularly those which have been, wrongly, interpreted to blame IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi for problems in the party.
”This is a contrived and inaccurate representation of the paper and its key arguments,” Woods said.
Document pulls no punches
The Mail & Guardian reported on August 5 that the discussion document, titled The IFP: Crisis of Identity and of Public Support, was written by Woods at the request of the party’s leadership and tabled before a national parliamentary caucus earlier this year.
Among other things, it calls for the ”infusion of new thinking and new minds”.
The document pulls no punches: ”The reinvention of the party should be sought through a zero-based approach, which resists unchallenged assumptions, holy cows, single truths, knee-jerk denials or quick fixes.”
Its brutally honest assessment of the party’s flailing identity angered Buthelezi to such an extent, the M&G reported, that he recalled all the copies and ordered that they be shredded to keep them from the media.
The document notes that in the mid-1980s the IFP was the fastest-growing organisation, with a signed-up membership of two million.
”Policies and positions were argued publicly and with confidence across the national agenda … these displayed moral fortitude and genuine concern and caring for the country and its people.”
After 1987, the party began floundering, largely because it was unable to extricate itself from the violence sweeping KwaZulu-Natal.
”It lost its ‘big picture’ perspective of the changing political environment … it moved from a wide strategic approach to day-to-day and issue-by-issue tactics. It became increasingly reactionary, defensive and internalised in its thinking.”
After 1994 the situation continued to deteriorate for the party, the report notes.
”It lost moral authority and in general the IFP underperformed in the KwaZulu-Natal government, and in particular those departments headed by IFP provincial ministers.”
Today, the IFP ”demonstrates little, if any, human caring towards many instance of deprivation and suffering … its highest-level meetings [national council] are mostly lengthy, self-involved talk sessions … Its resolutions are very seldom honoured.”