Mangosuthu Buthelezi, president of the Inkatha Freedom Party, reminds me of the main character in a perspicacious Zulu myth.
uNkulunkulu (God) sent a chameleon (unwabu) to say that people should not die. The unwabu loitered on the way to eat ubukwebezane — the fruit of the tree. Then uNkulunkulu sent a lizard to say that people would die. The lizard ran and reached the destination before the unwabu. When the unwabu later arrived, the people wouldn’t believe him.
This myth is a message about death, which originated from the failure of human beings, or their messengers, like the unwabu, to relay a message of mortality punctually.
Buthelezi is like the unwabu. On the one hand, he is a wily tactician who has survived 30 years of politics because of his ability to reinvent himself.
But on the other hand, he has, over the past 10 years, become the fomenter of the Inkatha Freedom Party’s demise because of his failure to champion his messages of revision and service delivery to his electorate.
Buthelezi’s political adroitness, once encapsulated by his ability to balance the contradiction of being a Bantustan leader who was simultaneously the head of a purported mass liberation movement, the Inkatha National Cultural Liberation Movement, was reduced to a glut of irascible and accusative speeches at the party’s annual general conference in Ulundi two weeks ago.
The party, which boasted a million members in the mid-1980s, is now a flicker of its former self and is no longer a serious contender in the mainstream.
The numbers speak for themselves.
In 1978, the German Arnold- Bergstraesser Institute conducted an opinion poll, which showed that Buthelezi enjoyed the support of 43% of people in Soweto, Durban and Pretoria as opposed to Nelson Mandela’s 21%. Between 1975 and 1979, the IFP’s membership grew by 300%.
Since 1994, the party has shed 50% of its voter support and has experienced an almost total rejection by voters in eight of the nine provinces. Over the same time, it has lost 40% of its Zulu support. Nearly 90% of its support now comes from rural KwaZulu-Natal and it enjoys only 2% of the major urban vote.
Last April, the African National Congress trounced the IFP in the KwaZulu-Natal provincial election and over the past year the IFP has lost at least 65% of the by-elections it has contested in the province.
With limited political leverage in the legislature and local government, it has become easy prey in the floor-crossing feeding frenzy.
By Friday last week, it had lost five of its MPs, cutting its number of seats to 23. In KwaZulu-Natal, the number of IFP seats had been slashed by three to 27.
The entire Youth Brigade leadership, with the exception of the brigade chairperson and Buthelezi loyalist Thulasizwe Buthelezi, has defected to Ziba Jiyane’s new party, the National Democratic Convention — a modern, relevant party that promises to rise above the individual egos that dictate the IFP.
Yet Buthelezi continues to insist in various newspaper articles, letters and speeches that he is at the heart of ”renewal, regeneration and rejuvenation” in the party.
”I am a democrat. I have always exercised a collegial type of leadership and have worked with all those who work with me,” he remarked.
Read: ”I have always exercised a collegial type of leadership and have worked with all those who dare not challenge me.”
At the annual conference, Buthelezi dedicated a seven-page assault on former party chairperson and revisionist, Jiyane, who, despite his own shortcomings, attempted to infuse the IFP with young blood and fresh ideas — a secondary level of leadership.
Buthelezi accused him of being ”deeply manipulative”, of intending to ”do a Marthinus van Schalkwyk-type operation” on the IFP by taking it into the fold of the ANC.
The IFP president strategically delivered this unscheduled speech minutes before the voting for the new chairperson took place — albeit widely understood that the winner was predetermined — sending an unspoken message that loyalty to him supersedes democracy in the IFP.
His second speech, a 12-page tirade aimed at the ANC, which he blamed as the cause of the IFP’s political misfortune over the past few years, proved that political vituperation has come to characterise this great survivor of South African politics.
Buthelezi’s insistence that he is ”revising” the party is as fraudulent as his promises that the party ”cares”.
A prudent look at the IFP-run municipalities shows that in general they are managed like fiefdoms with scant regard for delivery. According to the Local Government in South Africa 2004 – 2006 Year Book, uThukela District Municipality, for example, has 143 000 households. Of these, 121 000 don’t have access to electricity, and 66 000 don’t have access to water. In Maphumulo municipality, 17 000 households out of a total of 22 000 still rely on candles, 15 000 still collect their water from a river and 11 000 use pit latrines. In Msinga municipality, out of a total of 32 000 households, 28 000 still use candlelight, 19 000 collect water from a river and 22 000 have no sanitation facilities.
The election of Zanele Magwaza, the mayor of Zululand district municipality and a slavish Buthelezi loyalist, as the IFP’s new national person will push the party further into a heady mixture of conservatism, ethnicity and patronage.
Buthelezi has surrounded himself with yes-men/women. Those who have attempted to kick start a culture of debate and reform, such as former IFP MP Gavin Woods and Jiyane, have been relegated to the heap of other intellectuals, such as Frank Mdlalose, Ben Ngubane and Oscar Dlomo, who attempted, over the years, to resuscitate the party.
Thirty years after he gave birth to the IFP, Buthelezi is painstakingly writing its obituary.