The African National Congress (ANC) provincial government may be in office in KwaZulu-Natal, but they are not in control, Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) president Mangosuthu Buthelezi said at the party’s provincial conference in Pietermaritzburg on Sunday.
”My goodness, how they love being in office, but it is almost like a pilot who cannot stop his aircraft plummeting to earth,” he said at the Hexagon theatre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where the conference is being held.
”You’ve seen it in the movies … he wildly pulls this lever, then another, but the dials are spinning wildly and he cannot stop the plane’s freefall.
”The ANC provincial government just doesn’t know what to do. They are completely out of their depth,” said Buthelezi.
He said while the ANC in the province may have huge budgets; ”most of them do not have the faintest idea what to do with those billions”.
Buthelezi said he believed that the IFP could baffle the ”pundits” in 2009 like they did 1994, by winning the election.
”When we decided we were going to participate in elections on the April 19 1994, it motivated every member of our party to participate in the election. The rest is history.”
He said the province was then won with a clear majority, and with a gain of more than 10% of the overall vote.
He said it was now eight months before the next election and the odds were once again stacked against the IFP.
”I must confess that the generation of people who took my warnings seriously and earned us the 1994 success have, by and large, disappeared.”
He also said one had to accept that potential voters would stay away from the polls.
”Some of the issues we must wrestle with are food scarcity, xenophobia, HIV and Aids, and political instability”.
He said that the country needed credible alternatives, ”and if we fail to provide them, we only have ourselves to blame … We have a real
crisis of leadership on our hands.”
Comprehensive voter registration was the first task towards ensuring their success in the poll, said Buthelezi.
He said in the aftermath of the ”dastardly” xenophobic attacks, the most pressing problem in South Africa was food security.
”South Africans who are hungry believe, wrongly, that foreign residents are taking food and jobs. We must be tough on xenophobia and tough on the causes of xenophobia.
”The roots of such decadent lawlessness lie in an entrenched national malaise.”
Buthelezi said ”the muscle of the state” had to fight poverty.
”Failure to find solutions quickly will, I fear, result in the widespread rioting and looting that we have witnessed in countries from Egypt to Indonesia.” – Sapa