Inkatha Freedom Party president Mangosuthu Buthelezi said on Saturday that he had approached African National Congress president Jacob Zuma to intervene in the deteriorating relations between the two parties in KwaZulu-Natal.
Addressing thousands of IFP supporters at the party’s annual conference in Ulundi on Saturday, Buthelezi read out the letter he had written to Zuma recently.
Buthelezi said that he was concerned about the lack of reconciliation between the two parties.
He accused the ANC of not cooperating in attempts to heal the rift between the two parties.
Relations between the ANC and the IFP worsened when IFP provincial ministers Nyanga Ngubane and Blessed Gwala were fired by the ANC-led legislature in 2005.
Buthelezi said ANC leaders had also failed to attend an April 2008 lecture on improving relations between the two parties which was held by Professor Herbert Vilakazi
He said the ANC’s failure to attend was made ”conspicuous” by their absence, especially after they had agreed to attend the lecture.
He also discussed the issue of changing the province’s capital from Pietermaritzburg to Ulundi. The ANC moved the provincial capital from Ulundi to Pietermaritzburg after the 2004 election, when it won control of the province.
”The ANC in the legislature colluded with the DA and voted for Pietermaritzburg as the sole capital,” he said.
”What I find hurtful and difficult to accept is the rationale that Premier Sbu Ndebele likes to use that Ulundi was to be discarded as it was previously the capital of a bantustan.” – Sapa