The Johannesburg City Hall walls vibrate with the latest kwaito and house music sounds; the floors shake from the roar of the crowds as they dance and march around the hall; youths perform the latest dance moves amid screams of ”Heitha maGauteng Heitha! [Howzit Gauteng!]”
If the IFP’s first ”national listening campaign” at the Johannesburg City Hall is anything to go by, the party is moving away from its rural support base and reaching out to a younger, urban Âconstituency.
Young people were clearly in the majority in the packed hall on Wednesday night and IFP president Mangosuthu Buthelezi told them: ”We recognise that a modern political party needs to adapt to new ways of determining what the voters want; one could call it the democratic cascade.”
The facelift is obviously a response to the IFP’s steady haemorrhaging of electoral support since 1994, culminating in its loss of the Kwazulu-Natal government and the dropping of Buthelezi from the national Cabinet.
Supporters came from across the Reef to Wednesday’s session, from Soweto, Ivory Park, Thokoza, Benoni and Pretoria. ”People who say Inkatha is dying are not serious. The number of people here prove that,” said IFP member Sibusiso Phakathi.
The chairperson of the IFP Youth Brigade, Bheki Gumbi, confirmed the new approach: ”Our focus is on the youth; we are more concerned about issues that affect the youth — such as education, unemployment — than [with] history.”
Party leader Buthelezi insisted that there had been no decline in the number of IFP supporters, saying there was general frustration with the political process, reflected in the fact that 11-million voters had stayed away in the last election.
”We wish to address the deep-seated and damaging disaffection with politics that has grown in recent years,” he said.
Although the listening campaign emphasised that the IFP is a non-racial party with a long history of service to South Africa, the meeting was overwhelmingly a Zulu-speaking affair, suggesting that the IFP’s appeal is still predominantly an ethnic one.
Speakers from the floor raised broad concerns about the government’s performance, asking Buthelezi to raise with the authorities such issues as the lack of jobs and the influx of foreigners into South Africa; poor health conditions and the lack of health facilities in the townships; and the slow rate of land delivery.
Buthelezi was also asked how the IFP would change the state policy on HIV/Aids.
Positioning itself as the best option to take on the ruling party, the IFP said it is the only non-racial, predominantly black party with the long-term potential to govern the country.
Also surprising to long-term IFP watchers was the new note of humility in its public pronouncements.
IFP secretary general Musa Zondi told the session: ”We are not so cocky as to announce to the world that we have all the solutions to all that is wrong. We can’t presume to understand all your concerns and so we can’t presume either that we know all the answers.”