Date: 08/12/2009
Source: The Inkatha Freedom Party
Title: IFP: Buthelezi: Speech by the IFP president, on elections in Sub-Sahara Africa: New dynamics in party systems, Brussels

I am delighted to be here today in Brussels and I would like to thank
the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) for organising this outstanding
forum. I would like to thank Ms Andrea Ostheimer for organising this
conference with her characteristic flair and élan. It is also
marvelous to be among friends again, some of whom I have not seen
since we last met in Berlin and Johannesburg in 2005.

I am also gratified to be, for the first time, sharing a platform at a
KAS Conference with my former cabinet colleague, the Honourable
Mosiuoa Lekota. Although we hailed from two different liberation
organisations, the African National Congress (ANC) and Inkatha Freedom
Party (IFP), I was always impressed by the fearless and uncluttered
commitment the Honourable Lekota showed in upholding the spirit and
provisions of our liberal democratic Constitution in less sunnier
political climes for opposition parties than now. Indeed, we both were
invited to give farewell speeches to the former Leader of the Official
Opposition, the Honourable Tony Leon in 2007. I am therefore not
entirely surprised that we are today sharing a platform about
evaluating the new dynamics in the party systems in Sub-Sahara Africa,
as our collaboration does, as they say, 'have a history'!

Every story, of course, has a historical context. Today's challenges
for a "traditional" and 'casual' centre-right opposition party, like
the IFP, must be understood within the highly fluid political economy
of South Africa which brought President Jacob Zuma to power this year;
and which secured for the ANC a resounding fourth general election
victory: the so-called "Zunami!" The events which paved the way for Mr
Zuma to trump President Thabo Mbeki and seize the leadership of the
ANC in Polokwane in 2007 are well known. The Mbeki government followed
a market-oriented programme of black economic empowerment, creating a
new black middle class and a much resented small black elite. The
impressive national economic growth rate has not, thus far, been
matched by job creation and has seen a further widening of the already
disturbing wealth gap. South Africa has recently overtaken Brazil as
the world's most unequal nation without enjoying Brazil's commodity
boom or solid framework of governance. Mbeki's stewardship did,
however, generate much-needed foreign investment and has created
international trust which President Zuma and his successors cannot
afford to squander. I feel I must acknowledge this fact as an
opposition leader and patriot.

I will not recount the factors which led to President Mbeki's tragic
Shakespearian downfall, although they paved the way for the formation
of the Honourable Lekota's party, Congress of the People (Cope). The
formation of Cope as a breakaway party from the ANC, I believe, was an
excellent development for our democracy and for the health of the
ruling-party itself. Times of political upheavals also provide
opportunities for introspection. It was in the convulsive jet-stream
of Polokwane that the 33rd annual general conference of the IFP held
in August 2008 marked the launch of our campaign for the 2009
elections and we undertook the most extensive and nationwide process
of public policy formation in our organisation's history. This
exercise cut straight to the heart of the question of the identity of
the IFP, and the fight for its 'heart and soul' which is, as I speak,
still being hotly contested. I personally found it rewarding, often
moving, and always inspiring as I listened to our supporters
well-thought out ideas across the nation from Johannesburg City Hall
to the rural hinterland of KwaZulu-Natal.

The public policies which emerged from this process reflected a
diversity of input. Neither left nor right, liberal nor conservative,
the policy positions provided an Africanist-influenced,
social-democratic agenda that was broadly humanist and rooted in black
consciousness self-help ideals. Consequently, the 2009 IFP candidate
list included a diverse group of prospective parliamentarians in terms
of their social composition even though they were more homogenous in
terms of political outlook than at any time since 1994. In simple
terms, perhaps for the first time, our public representatives 'looked'
like the people who voted for us.

It is also interesting to observe how the values of our supporters
seem to be broadly converging with the social democratic aims of the
Constitution as opposed ? and this is important - to the more narrowly
defined political aims of the ruling-party. The ANC is described,
misleadingly in my view, as a social democratic party. It is, in fact,
a broad church of elites and interests with a number of competing
ideologies. This phenomenon nevertheless points to evidence of growing
sophistication on the part of the electorate and, equally, the
government's undoubted success in inculcating respect for our
Constitution and Bill of Rights among the citizenry.

We also sharpened and honed our critique of the ruling-party's
multiple failures more cogently than at any time since 1994. We
focused on government corruption and graft, the failure of the ANC to
act on promises about the powers and functions of traditional leaders
while continuing to erode traditional authority through legislation,
President Thabo Mbeki's HIV-Aids denialism and, as you have heard me
state before, the increasingly blurred dividing lines between the
ruling-party and the state. The latter is, of course, equally
pertinent to the entire Sub-Saharan African continent.

On the last point, I think, perhaps for the first time, the opposition
in South Africa has begun to succeed in inculcating an understanding
among the electorate of the interconnected linkages between the
burgeoning culture of entitlement and institutional incapacity within
the state as key factors in both the enrichment of an ANC low-level
kleptocracy on the one hand, and the failure of public service
delivery on the other hand. You may recall how I opined in 2005 how
difficult it was to explain a highly theoretical concept in a
procedural democracy with "solidified" voting patterns. But while the
electorate has started to join the dots, the electoral tree has not
yet yielded electoral fruits for the opposition ? apart from the
Democratic Alliance's success in the Western Cape. But the polar
icecap which is South African politics has at least begun to thaw, and
this is one form of geopolitical warming we can all welcome.

In many ways, the 2009 election result made most South African voters
feel like their team had won. In that way it reflected something of
the spirit of the 1994 election, although less hope is evident ? but
which might be revived if we host a successful FIFA Tournament in
2010, and we begin to heal the divisions of the Mbeki presidencies, as
well as consolidate the former President's considerable achievements
such as economic stability. Multi-party democracy is thriving and the
fears of one-party domination have, for now, been laid to rest.
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, one of the best indicators of this
was the IFP's ability to survive against the odds. The numbers, you
might be surprised to learn, support this contention.

While I candidly admit that we would like to have done much better,
the IFP was certainly not eliminated and, against the odds, secured
4.5% of the vote with 860, 000 votes. This gave us a representation of
18 members in the National Assembly (out of 400 seats) and
KwaZulu-Natal Legislature (out of 80 seats): the latter result was
particularly disappointing considering the fact that the IFP had put
up lively opposition to a lacklustre government in the last provincial
parliament.

According to all media accounts, the party suffered a major defeat in
the 2009 election. While it is true that the IFP's proportion of the
vote at the national level and in all the provincial ballots did
decline, as for the decline in the proportion of the vote, the IFP won
only 229, 490 fewer votes in 2009 than in the previous election in
2004. What happened? The answer is that the ANC surged, buoyed by the
'Zuma Factor'. In 2009 there was an increase of 750, 000 new voters
who turned out; they were located in the metropolitan area of
eThekweni (greater Durban) and Msunduzi ? core ANC areas. So whereas
the ANC increased its share of the popular vote in KZN in 2009, it was
not in fact through enormous inroads into the IFP support base ?
although it did make some which we are concerned about - but through
an increase in the numbers of votes in the two metropolitan areas in
which the party has traditionally received support and which voter
turnout in 2009 was huge. In the informal and prosaic words of a
friendly political scientist, the ANC captured "young and sexy voters
with pointy shoes!" The IFP strategy to focus upon its core supporters
and areas and to refrain from electoral alliances and populist
promises meant it did not, rightly or wrongly, seek or gain these
voters. With 20/20 hindsight this might have been a mistake. But at
the same time the ANC did not make massive inroads into the
traditional IFP support base.

It would be churlish not to acknowledge that the most significant
challenge to the diverse character of the IFP came from the ANC
presidential candidate Jacob Zuma. In short, Zuma combined a unique
appeal, bridging urban and rural, regional and national, a man both
respectful and powerful, a leader with a 'true' Zulu lineage and also
a charismatic national and nationalist reputation. I also believe,
however, that the 'Zuma Factor' has peaked: if Mr Zuma is destined to
be a one-term president, it is unlikely that voters will 'split' their
ballots in future, or that the urban turnout will be as high as in
2009. But again, the IFP must be vigilant and reclaim lost ground. In
addition to the 'Zuma Factor', I should mention en passant, the IFP
also had two other major arrayed against it during the election
campaign: the ANC had a R200 million war chest at its disposal, while
we had practically nothing. We were also largely ignored at every turn
by a mainly hostile media and we were vulnerable to the ANC's cheque
book politicking and random acts of electoral irregularities such as
double and underage voting.

The country's biggest newspaper the Sunday Times reported during the
general election campaign that the ANC used state resources to deliver
food parcels to bribe voters. It was established that ANC ward
councillors compiled the list of relief recipients; food hampers, in
some instances, grew to include bubble bath, canned fruit, chicken,
concentrated fruit drinks and branded food; ANC officials either
accompanied government workers or solely distributing the relief aid;
in some instances, they distributed food to everybody who pitched up,
even if they do not qualify; and recipients who were members of other
parties, or turned up wearing opposition parties' paraphernalia, were
turned away from queues.

The IFP, Democratic Alliance (DA), United Democratic Movement (UDM)
and COPE condemned the abuse of social distress relief grants. NGOs,
including the Black Sash, also condemned the practice. The then
Minister of finance Trevor Manuel allocated R500-million to the
department in November 2008 to use as relief grants for indigent
families. KwaZulu-Natal was allocated R119-million and the Eastern
Cape R100-million, Again, the state/party dividing lines are blurred.

I therefore contend that in this milieu, on balance, the IFP fared
okay in the 2009 election, although I am sensitised to the fact that
we would have been eliminated from parliamentary representation if we
were operating within the five percent threshold of proportional
representation employed here in Germany or in Israel. So to use a
cricketing analogy, the IFP is still at the crease, but the bowling is
rough, very rough. I would add at this point, the team captain ? that
is me ? is still standing! As the title of my intervention implies,
the biggest challenge for the IFP remains its stubborn depiction by
our detractors as a Zulu traditional party.

As a party, we have still not overcome the brilliant tactics of the
ANC-in-exile and its internal associates like the United Democratic
Front in stigmatising the IFP as a Zulu nationalist party and me
specifically as a Zulu ethnic entrepreneur post 1979. Dr Anthea
Jeffrey offers a meticulous account in the recently published People's
War of how, to quote Martin Williams' review in the Citizen newspaper,
the African National Congress rose to power based on a 'people's war'
strategy learned from Vietnamese and Soviet communists. Williams
continues: "People's War is an all-embracing combination of
propaganda, organisation and violence. All individuals, no matter what
their affiliation or age, are potential weapons of war. They can be
victims or perpetrators. All are expendable".

To be fair, as continental Europeans know all too well, the rewriting
of history by those who shaped the events under scrutiny to suit their
intellectual outlook is a fact of life. As a result, 'rewritten' is
the only kind of history there is. The problem with rewriting history
occurs when the political elite of the day decides to rewrite history
as it is occurring, rather than wait decorously for an appropriate
moment of retrospection. Stalin, as Orwell correctly deduced in
Nineteen Eighty-Four and elsewhere in his fiction, was big on
rewriting things as they happened and this habit led to the virtual
collapse of the Soviet reality. Likewise, a denial of the South
African - and even Southern African - reality has been a prominent
feature of the government by the African National Congress (ANC)
post-1994.

It was in 1984 ? during the height of the Cold War in the
international theatre ? that the "township war" began and the
so-called "black-on-black" violence exploded. Replete with tragic
irony, the armed struggle was to claim the lives of 20,000 black
people during the black-on-black conflict, completely disproportional
to the 600 white people who lost their lives. Many whites were able to
depict the violence as a tribal conflict between Zulu nationalists and
Xhosa ANC supporters and further claimed that it proved that blacks
were unfit to govern. These perceptions stuck. Research survey after
research survey still shows today that Zulus and the IFP in particular
are still associated with violence. This negative view of the party as
'Zulu only' is popular in academic analyses and is slavishly
replicated in the urban media. I would like to place on record my
eternal gratitude that the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung did not buy into
this seductive narrative.

Thus the challenges are clear cut: one, in order to attract new voters
the IFP has to find a way to change the negative view of the party in
constituencies that have not previously voted IFP. This means
challenging head on the perception that the party is an ethnic-based
Zulu traditional party. In order to do so, we must cultivate a new
relationship with the media and must be fearless in taking on
entrenched orthodoxies in the academic establishment. We must get our
policy messages into the public domain despite the media's fixation
with personalities. We need the IFP to be associated in the public
mind with issues like climate change and social justice, not with
internal personality issues. We also need in a twenty-first century
world where branding is all, to effectively politically market the
IFP. This, however, requires savior-faire and financial capital. We
have some of the former, but none of the latter.

Mark Twain once said "reports of my death have been greatly
exaggerated". He could have been writing about the Inkatha Freedom
Party. Despite the factors which I have outlined, the fact is that
more than 800, 000 people supported the IFP at the last general
election. The total number of votes received by the party, despite its
diminished number of parliamentary seats, shows that we are still a
significant force in South African politics. I believe people believe
in us and keep faith with us. Our supporters voted for us despite
their knowledge that we were likely to only garner a small sliver of
the national vote. As one academic put it: "If Zuma could not capture
these voters from the IFP, who possibly can?" For me, however, there
is a deeper and more compelling question. One which maybe you can help
me answer. How can we grow the support base of a party whose policies
and raison d'être continue to distinguish itself from other political
parties and resonate with the opinions of more than 800, 000 people?
How do we cast off a two generations old stigmatisation of being a
Zulu ethnic-based party and be the force for change in South African
politics? I believe it can and must be done.

I thank you.