8th December 2009

Today in Brussels, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, President of the IFP, addressed an international conference of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung on "Elections in Sub-Sahara Africa: New Dynamics in the Party Systems", and spoke on "The Challenges of a Traditional Opposition Party".

Prince Buthelezi noted that 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. 

He said, "The values of IFP supporters seem to be broadly converging with the social democratic aims of the Constitution, as opposed to the more narrowly defined political aims of the ruling-party. The ANC is a broad church of elites and interests with a number of competing ideologies."

Buthelezi contends that the electorate has finally seen the burgeoning culture of entitlement and institutional incapacity within the State as key factors in both the enrichment of an ANC low-level kleptocracy, and the failure of public service delivery.

He expressed concern that South Africa's impressive national economic growth rate has not been matched by job creation and that the wealth gap has widened in the absence of a solid framework of governance.

However, Buthelezi assured that "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, securing 4.5% of the vote with 860, 000 votes. This gave us a representation of 18 members in the National Assembly."

The decline in the proportion of votes for the IFP, said Buthelezi, is due to a combination of the 'Zuma Factor' and other challenges, not least the fact that the ANC had a R200 million war chest at its disposal, while the IFP had practically nothing; the IFP was largely ignored by a mainly hostile media; and it was vulnerable to the ANC's cheque-book politicking and random acts of electoral irregularities, such as double and underage voting.

Buthelezi also noted that the IFP has 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 Buthelezi as a Zulu ethnic entrepreneur post 1979. Buthelezi bemoaned the fact that "This negative view of the party as 'Zulu only'  is popular in academic analyses and is slavishly replicated in the urban media.'

This is despite the fact that Dr Anthea Jeffrey offers a meticulous account in the recently published "People's War" of how the ANC rose to power based on a strategy learned from Vietnamese and Soviet communists, which combines propaganda, organisation and violence, in which everyone is expendable. 

In his closing remarks, Buthelezi said of the IFP: "We are still a significant force in South African politics. I believe people believe in us and keep faith with us. As one academic put it: 'If Zuma could not capture these voters from the IFP, who possibly can?'" 

Contact:
Liezl van der Merwe
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