Address by
 Mangosuthu Buthelezi, MP
PRESIDENT OF THE INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY

This 30^th Annual General Conference of our party takes place at the most difficult and yet most exciting time in the history of our country and that of our Party.  30 years ago we embarked on a process which we knew would eventually succeed.  We did not know how long this process would take or what road it would actually follow, but we knew that in its destination the outcome would be the establishment of a non-racial democratic South Africa and the liberation of the oppressed majority of our people.  When we embarked on that process, we also knew that Inkatha would have a major role to play in bringing about our liberation and that once liberation was achieved it would have an equally important role to play in securing the benefits of liberation for our constituency.  The path was long, hard and uphill; yet, step by step, stage by stage, battle by battle that path proved to be clearly visible and identifiable as we walked on it. 

During the darker stages of our struggle for liberation, amidst the despair of frustration, and while in the fogs of doubt of growing human sufferings, our path was lit by the strong moral leadership of committed leaders who knew what had to be done and how we could get about doing it.  That moral leadership is now but lost, save for what only the Inkatha Freedom Party still beholds and treasures. 

I make this statement with confidence because it is not a self reflecting one, but really speaks of you, the people and the leaders of Inkatha. 

Since its genesis, Inkatha has been deeply rooted in the profound sense of morality which has inspired our journey and supported our action.  It has not just been my own morality as the Founder and Leader of Inkatha, but it has indeed been the morality of the entire body politic of Inkatha.  Our history proves it.  We refused to jump on the band wagon which throughout the world was advocating international sanctions and a campaign of disinvestments against South Africa, because we knew them to be wrong, ineffective and detrimental to the poorest of the poor, while being immaterial for the affluent segment of our then ruling class.  History proved us right, sanctions did not have such a significant bearing on the demise of apartheid, but gave severe blow to our economy which still carries into these days a devastating legacy of unemployment and underdevelopment.  The foreign investments and related jobs which the ANC eagerly chased away 20 years ago have not yet come back and because of it today more people are unemployed.

Let me remind you of the meeting that I had in London with the president of the ANC Mission-in-exile Dr Oliver Tambo in 1979.  Both of us had delegations which participated in the two-and-a-half days meeting at a London Airport Hotel.  Some of the people in the delegation of the President of the ANC included the present President of the ANC, who is also the president of this country President Thabo Mbeki.

In my delegation I had people such as the late Rt Revd Dr Bishop Alphaeus Hamilton Zulu who was asked by both Dr Tambo and myself to chair the meeting.  In my delegation I had many of our senior leaders who included our then Secretary-General the Hon Dr Oscar Dhlomo, our former National Chairman the Hon Dr Frank Mdlalose, our present Secretary-General the Hon Rev Musa Zondi.  It included our women delegates such as the late Mrs Faith Gasa and our youth leaders such as Mr Ntwe Mafole.  The list is too long as we were 17 in number.

The only issues such a meeting had to discuss was the issue of sanctions and disinvestment which the ANC wanted Inkatha to commit itself to and the other was the so-called armed struggle which they also wanted us to endorse.  We could not endorse either of those policies.  For this we paid a high price.  Sluice gates were opened.  Up to that time I worked very closely with the leader of the ANC Mission-in-exile Dr Oliver Tambo.  There were already sections of the ANC which conducted a campaign of vilification against me.  In fact the 12 members of the ANC who defected from the ANC mentioned as one of the reasons for their breaking away from the ANC, their objection to the closeness of Dr Tambo to me.  This was in November.  Although we were promised a response to our own views at the London meeting in December, 1979, that was not to be.  We never heard from the ANC, and on the 25^th of June 1980, the Secretary-General of the ANC the late Mr Alfred Nzo then launched a blistering attack on me in London.  After that even Dr Oliver Tambo started attacking me also through broadcasts through Radio Freedom from Lusaka and Dar es Salaam.  This was of course followed by the launching of the United Democratic Front I 1984 in Cape Town.  The UDF was an internal front of the ANC.  At their very launch the UDF Leadership announced that they were an umbrella organization which welcomed affiliation by any Organisation which was opposed to Apartheid except INKATHA which they stated was not welcome.  I relate this part of our history to indicate that we have always paid very high prices for our convictions throughout the history of our organization.  Throughout our history as have never hesitated to do what we believe is the right thing to do.  We are all aware of the low intensity civil war that followed in 1984, and up to now which has cost us as this Nation, more than 20,000 human lives.

As we were then, today we are the moral leaders of employment generation, as we have put forwards comprehensive polices to jumpstart economic development, ranging from the green revolution, to privatization, a plan of industrial development and a real package of incentives to attract foreign investment    Today, as it was the case then, South Africa and its people suffer because the ANC does not listen.  This happens even when the ANC realizes that we are right, but because of its lack of real leadership is stopped dead in its track by its alliance partners: COSATU and the SACP.  For instance, after ten years, the President finally listened to our echoing demands for more flexibility in the labour market to open positions for the unemployed, but was stopped by his own structures.  Similarly, IFP proposals such as privatization and the lifting of exchange controls have been formally adopted as ANC policies yet never implemented because of COSATU’s veto’s power.  Even the immigration legislation  I piloted when I was Minister of Home Affairs to promote economic growth by attracting needed skills was amended beyond recognition within two months of the new ANC Minister being empowered, with the end result of the system having now collapsed, and effectively in many respects reverted back to what it was prior to its reform.   The ANC just does not listen, and over the years its not listening has created a disaster in respect unemployment.  Because we are right, we bear the responsibility to light the path ahead out of the tunnel of unemployment.  Because I am the veritable bete noire, no one will highlight even in the media how many times I have been right and how many times they have been wrong.

We were equally right when we opposed the ANC’s call for an armed struggle and a possible military insurrection as the way to achieve our liberation.  We paid a huge price for our stand as the ANC turned the armed struggle against us, as many of our comrades were killed, tortured or became the object of other forms of brutality.  As we begin this Conference which marks a turning point in the history of South Africa as well as that of our Party, it is proper and fitting that we stop and pause to reflect on and honour the memory of all our victims who died in the conflicts of the past.  We must remember and honor the more than 400 IFP leaders who have been murdered in a systematic plan of mass and targeted assassinations in their houses, at taxi ranks or in well planned ambushes.  In only five percent of all such cases, all of which were duly reported to the police, an arrest was made.  The conviction rate is even lower which shows how not only our comrades died paying the ultimate price for the convictions we hold, but also that they had to do so without the benefit of their deaths being vindicated through the system of criminal justice.  This fact alone proves how the criminal justice system has either collapsed or is so deeply biased towards the ruling party that it can not bring to book and prosecute criminals and murderers acting in the interest of the ruling party.   I have pointed this out during each one of my responses to the President’s State of the Nation Address.

Many of our brothers and sisters have now arrived to positions of power.  Many of those who were previously dispossessed are now powerful or rich.  However, while a few have become more powerful and richer, the great majority continues to suffer and their sufferings are being ignored.  It is paradoxical and indeed deeply saddening that the plight of the poorest of the poor was much more sensitively felt by many segments of our society during the period preceding our liberation than it is now.   A syndrome of denial, avoidance and self delusion seems to possess our ruling class.  With stubborn determination they seem to be denying the very existence of the problems affecting all of us. 

A few months ago I spoke in Parliament in the President’s debate and made a statement I have been repeating for the past ten years in the hope that those in power would finally listen to it.  I stated that crime is out of control and that I know no-one who has not been a victim of crime or lives in fear of becoming one.  When I made that statement I was almost contrived because I felt it was such an obvious, trite and self evident statement that one would not need to repeat it time and again.  However, in his reply, no one less that the Chief Whip of the ruling party Mr Goniwe attacked me and mocked my statement by saying that everyone in South Africa is safe and that personally he knows no-one, I say no-one, who has been a victim of crime or lives in fear of becoming one.  Obviously, he does not live in the same world in which you and I have to struggle every day.  His is not the world of the hard-working earnest people who at the end of the week return to their townships and are robbed by young gangsters waiting for them at the taxi ranks to steal their hard earned wages.  His is not the world in which people in townships must constantly pay for the so-called protection so that they may survive without being beaten up, stabbed if not killed.  And yet just this week we were reading in our newspapers and listening to electronic news, when it was announced that not even the handbag of our Deputy-President is safe from the dirty fingers of our hoodlums.  Not even in her own house!  And yet the ruling Party’s refrain is always that there is no crime worth talking about in our Country.  That it is all exaggerated.  It is the normal crime that any Country has!

Even to build a shack, poor people have to scramble to find money to pay off somebody who has no right to give them any authorization to stay where they are.  If they do not pay, the consequences are often to dreadful to be contemplated.  It is a tax on poverty and desperation deeply rooted in crime and expressing the decay of a society becoming increasing more corrupt from the top down and the bottom up. 

However, no one within the ruling party raises his voice to condemn them and they act as if none of this would exist, to the point of having one of the highest ranking representatives rebutting me in the way he did in the highest venue of policy discussion in our country.  Obviously, when he denied that anyone in South Africa lives in fear of becoming a victim of crime, he joined the pathetic, deplorable and deeply reprehensible ranks of those who famously stated that they knew no-one in South Africa who had died of HIV/Aids.  They live in a different universe than the one in which ordinary people are adversely affected by crime, HIV/AIDS and unemployment.  Why is this happening?  What went wrong in our country.?  How can people become so oblivious to the real objectives of our liberation and the priority of our people?  How has it been possible that corruption has become such a permanent feature in all our levels of government?   The soul of our liberation struggle has been corrupted and lost.

Corruption has now openly and clearly invaded our public life, from the top to the bottom of our government structures to the point of having people rallying and making statements in its defense.  The situation is out of control.  We must ask ourselves how this is possible and where is it going to end up?  Also in this respect, there is a clear relationship between the past, the present and the future.  Some people have lost their morality, others never had it.  The same people who did not have enough morality not to kill us during the days of the black-on-black conflict are amongst those who are now ruling the country.  The same people who felt no moral qualms in unleashing campaigns of devastating sanctions and foreign disinvestment against their own country and against their own people are now showing no care for the sufferings of the same people.  There is an issue about moral leadership which underpins the very legitimacy to govern of those who are now in power.  This defines with clarity both the mission of Inkatha and its role for the next decades. 

The present situation vindicates the wisdom of this Annual General Conference which last year set our Party on a new course of action identifying its role as that of acting as a “moral opposition” not only in the interest of the IFP constituency but indeed also in the interest of the much larger ANC constituency which has now been abandoned by its leaders.  Today, the great divide is not between the IFP’s and the ANC’s constituencies.  Today the great divide is between the people on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the rulers and governors who have betrayed them, and placed their own interests above those of our liberation.  The divide is between those who are faithful to the original goals which led to the establishment of both the African National Congress and Inkatha alike and those who now feel that the position of comfort, power and wealth they have achieved should place them above all others.  There is no doubt on what side of this divide Inkatha stands.  I have never left our country. I have never left its suffering people. I have lived all my life amongst the poorest of the poor.  We, in Inkatha, have not any need of people to “report” to us about the devastation of HIV/Aids, the increasing levels of crime, the rising poverty and the growing unemployment.  We have witnessed it.  We have felt it on our own lives.  We have experienced it with our blood sweat and tears.  Yet, when I was in Cabinet and raised the fact that especially in rural areas all inclusive was on the increase, the President himself chided me questioning my statement.  When I publicly repeated the facts of the matter in Parliament, I was vilified as if I was advocating a return of past!  The ANC just does not wish to hear about it.  There was a roar of laughter right from the President to the most junior member of Parliament in the ANC benches, when Hon Dr Pallo Jordan deliberately twisted what I said to mean that I was suggesting that the Apartheid era was better than our present era.  That I was suggesting a return to Egypt! as Dr Jordan so colourfully put it.  This was preposterous!  I live in rural areas where I have been all my life and I was remarking that there was better food security in rural areas before 1994 than is the case now as people in rural areas throughout South Africa produced  some of what they ate from the land.  There is nothing like that today.  That is all I meant.  I challenge anyone to visit any of our rural areas such as KwaZulu Natal, Eastern Cape, Limpopo or Mpumalanga and see if I was wrong.

A blanket of silence is placed on the sufferings of the people and the rapid degeneration of South Africa.  Economic figures may be hopeful and may augur well for the future.  But there are many things the economic figures do not reflect at this juncture.  They do not reflect the lack of peace of mind in the houses of the South African people who at night fear the action of criminals at their doorsteps.  They do not reflect our decreasing levels of education.  They are still not reflecting the full economic cost of HIV/Aids.  They are oblivious to hunger and anger of those who do not have the dignity and support of an employment opportunity.  They are blind to the growing levels of malnutrition and anger in rural areas because of lack of food security programs.  The rate of economic growth may be up but so are the rate of unemployment, the rate of HIV infections, the rate of Aids related deaths, the poverty across the country and the rampant rate of corruption.  It is the role of the IFP to raise this blanket of silence and speak up for those who have been left without a voice because their chosen leaders have just lost touch with the grassroots.  Many of them never had any real touch with the grassroots because of reasons and conditions which were not their fault and for which we cannot blame them.  Nonetheless, they were not in touch then and they are not in touch now.  Many of them were in prison when Inkatha was in the trenches struggling for our liberation.  Some of them were in exile when we were promoting development at the grassroots to ensure that everyone could have the dignity of a job or at least enough food to feed his family through food security programs.  They then ascended to power and so far seem not to have any clue as to the extent of the suffering amongst our people.

Our liberation should have been the platform to bring many situations to a much better and higher level, and instead is turning out to be the path towards decay, regression and disintegration.  This is because those in power are not caring enough.  Liberation should have been the path through which the education system of South Africa should have increased in quality, instead we must register with horror,  how standards are deteriorating.  As the world becomes a global village, our children will need to compete for job opportunities not only with their peers within our country but with those from anywhere else in the world.  If our children are not sufficiently educated, their job opportunities will be moved away from South Africa to India, China, Mexico or elsewhere.  Many foreign children receive a secondary education which gives them a perspective on modern physics at a sub-atomic level, including quantum mechanics, yet, our children of comparable grade are not even being appraised about the theory of relativity which is now almost one hundred years old.   In their secondary schools biology class children abroad are taught about the Gaia theory which describes the purposeful growth of life on our planet as a single organism, while our own children are still struggling to receive some education about the hundred and fifty year old theory of evolution.  The very intellectual and cultural dimension and horizons of our children are dwarfed at the very outset cursing them to remain inferior to other children competing for future job opportunities in the global market.  And this takes place within our mainstream public education where there are decent classrooms and qualified teachers. In the vast fringes, the rest of our education system still witness conditions of underdevelopment, with no books, no computers, no qualified teachers and no decent classroom.  Today denying a child an Internet-linked computer is like denying access to books in my days.  All this is utterly unacceptable if we consider that our country spends one of the largest allocations of money anywhere in the world for education, calculated as a portion of our gross national product.

As far as education is concerned and indeed the future of our children, our revolution has been betrayed and the promise of our liberation blatantly insulted.  Our education system is a disaster and we seem not to care.  However, I do care.  I grew up in an environment in which I personally felt what it is like to know less than somebody who was better educated.  By and large, people are all equal and our given natural talents are equally distributed across racial, cultural and religious divides.  No race, ethnic group, religious community or other segment of our population is more clever or has more brain power than anyone else.  However, there are people who receive better education and therefore have a much greater opportunity of reaching the full development of their God-given potential.  Other people are left behind, not through any fault of their own, but because of insufficient care in promoting a high level education system.  Instead of taking the morally correct position of elevating the standards of our education system, because of their lack of moral leadership, courage and backbone, the ruling party has allowed it to deteriorate to an unacceptable standard.   This should be no surprise, for these people who come from the same stable which twenty years ago advocated “Liberation First, Education Later” causing an entire generation of our people to be brought up without any education.  What is now the lost generation was then forced to burn their own schools and destroy their own education system.  Their ANC leaders did not care about education then, and they do not care about education now.  We took the then morally correct stand of “Education for Liberation” and this stand is as moral and compelling now as it was then.  Education for liberation is still the slogan under which we must exercise our moral leadership to build a better future and denounce the insufficiency in the education system.  South Africa needs the moral leadership of the IFP to improve on the quality of the education, working both on the side of better training for teachers and better and more demanding curricula for students. 

Moral leadership is about walking the hard and uphill road towards success.  Lack of moral leadership has always been the choice of those who prefer the downhill and leisurely path which leads to degeneration and disintegration.  We inherited a system of government which was evil in its purposes but efficient in its mechanics and administration.  Before 1994, the government machinery of the South African State was not by far one of the most efficient in the world and indeed was old, inflated and obsolete, but it was functioning.  It should have been our responsibility and indeed a fulfillment of the promises of our liberation to make that machinery work better and more efficiently so that it could produce more and deliver better for the people of South Africa.  We correctly changed priorities for the Government machinery so that it could be more concerned about the poorest of the poor and less about the rich, which was important and essential.  However, at the same time the government machinery has imploded and disintegrated.  Telephones are not being answered, services are not being provided, accountability is becoming a paper exercise and civil servants are producing now much less than ever before.  Many of them are no longer civil servants because they do not serve anyone but themselves.  There are many civil servants who are honest and dedicated, but they are operating in an environment in which corruption, inefficiency, apathy, indolence and lack of results are widely tolerated if not rewarded.  The fault is not at the bottom.  The faulty is not at the level of civil servants.  Again, the fault lies at the top where the allocation of money and resources takes place.  All departments are spending far too much at the top layers of government and too little to get offices and delivery points working.  Ministers are more concerned about using State resources to wander around the country, be visible to their constituencies and deliver speeches, than they are about making their offices work.  If the State does not work, our liberation cannot take place.  The goal of our liberation was that of taking control of the State so that through it one could bring about the economic and social manoeuver necessary to redress the injustice of the past and bring about better social justice.   This is not happening and it will not happen, but the ANC leaders do not seem to care.  I care and am concerned.

The disintegration of the State spells out the failure of our liberation cause.  Not enough houses are being built for the poor and when they are built their costs comprise of many layers of corruption, payoffs, unnecessary and overpaid consultants, kickbacks and greased palms.  Houses promised ten years ago and funded at the same time are still to be built.  It remains incomprehensible why it takes longer for Government to complete a simple housing project than it takes for the private sector to build  huge shopping centres the size of East Gate or Century City.

 Because of the inefficiency of those at the top, the public sector is becoming morally bankrupt and is becoming increasingly incapable to providing the required moral leadership.  We need to change this.  We need to turn this around.  There is no one left but Inkatha with the required legitimacy to provide to each level of government the required moral leadership which points out the right direction to be followed.  We may not be in power.  We may not have the lion’s share of the vote, but we are the ones with the highest moral ground and who speak for the majority of the people of South Africa.  We do not need to be the biggest party, but we are and must continue to be the most morally oriented. We are the depository of the values, dreams and sound principles of the majority of the people of South Africa.  The majority of the people of South Africa are hard-working people with morality and values.  We express them and represent those values.  We are at one with the majority of South Africa.  It is our role, through our voice, to enable them to be heard and to be listened to.

The fact is that they are crazy if they believe that Inkatha would disappear if I were not its Leader.  I firmly intend to be around and continue to serve for many years to come,  for as long as the people of Inkatha wish me to. Yet our detractors are missing the point.  I am the leader of Inkatha because Inkatha is a Party of leaders.  You are the leaders.  If anyone wonders where the future leadership of Inkatha is,  they should just look around at the thousands of leaders assembled in this tent.  Each of you is perfectly capable of carrying Inkatha into its future for many generations to come because each of you has the strength of our constituency.  All the leaders of Inkatha have their heart married and merged to the heart and soul of the people of south Africa.  You can read their mind, you can feel their feelings, you can share their fears for you have wiped off their tears and consoled their sobs.  It is for this reason that our Party will remain and will grow for as long as the real liberation of the suffering people of South Africa remains so grossly unattended to, unfinished and unaccomplished.

As we speak corruption triumphs at the highest level of government where those who are supposed to set the example are instead engaged in the worst form of moral turpitude. They are stealing the most precious element of our democracy, namely the electors’ vote and the voters’ support.  The ruling party made crossing of the floor not only an element of its policy but indeed an article of its faith.  It passed legislation which it knew would be unconstitutional and which indeed was unconstitutional.  After such legislation being duly declared  unconstitutional, the ruling party went ahead and tampered with our Constitution so that the Constitution too could be prostituted to accommodate the ignominious conduct of those who cross the floor, whom history, not I, have now termed as the “crosstitutes”.  Our history and past experience has proven that those who cross the floor do not do so for ideological reasons or matters of principle.  They do so for personal gain because they are lured with the promises of better offices or they are sensitive to financial rewards and checkbook politics.  It is corruption at its worst.  The essence of corruption is when a public power is not exercised in the interests of the people but for the benefit of the bearing of that power.  The real practice of the crossing of the floor is that people exercise this power in their own interest and under the pressures or incitement of the ruling party, and therefore, even though they may not be corrupted according to the law, they are indeed the apotheosis and most clear example of corruption from a moral viewpoint.  With each person who crosses the floor our democracy suffers and the ruling party loses its legitimacy to govern. 

The crossing of the floor legislation clearly shows how that which is corruption in the mind of any morally sound individual in this Country is not corruption in terms of the law and for purposes of legality.  The chasm between legality and morality is widening.  Morality no longer underpins the law and the law has become secluded in some remote ivory tower.  It is not only the gap between morality and legality which is rapidly widening, but also that between legality and reality.  There are vast areas of our Country in which legality no longer exists and in which there is no government, no policing, no law and order. 

Everyone has the legal right to health and yet people do not receive antiretroviral drugs which our Cabinet approved four years ago for expedited roll-out.  Antiretroviral drugs should have been rolled-out ten years ago and there is no conceivable reason why in the face of the HIV/Aids pandemic, a country with our resources and with our infrastructure should have not provided them to all those who are suffering and dying because of Aids.  The right to heath, which is the most basic right of a human being together with his right to peace and security, has been breached to its very foundations.  There are no excuses  or justification.  We cannot forgive.  We cannot forget.  We cannot justify.  The issue of HIV/Aids spells out the degree of which the present ruling class is morally bankrupt.  Underpinning their moral bankruptcy is the most outrageous of their actions in their reckless negligence in dealing with this pandemic.  Hundred of millions of US dollars which were ready to be donated, with no strings attached, to our government and our people from an international fund, were rejected by our own Government.   Our Government sent to the International community the message that they do not need their help and they do not want to receive their money.  They do not need their help?  They do not want to receive their money?  Who are they, may I ask?  Obviously they are not speaking on my behalf, nor on the behalf of the many people who have died of HIV/Aids or those that are still suffering because of it.  We need their help and want their money.  People who have died needed their help and wanted their money.  What right did our Government have to reject help when it itself is not doing to basics required to provide needed assistance for the greatest crisis our country has ever witnessed?  There is no conceivable reason why antiretroviral drugs have not yet been rolled-out not only to all the public health facilities but also in all the major private clinics and in workplaces, as I have advocated for many years.  There is no reason why we still do not have centres to attend to the needs of the many HIV/Aids orphans.  How do they dare to say that we do not need the money for villages where we  can host the many HIV/Aids orphans, to give them the option and the opportunity of a better future which frees them from the legacy of the great tragedy which befell them?  Obviously those who are in charge do not care.  It is time for them to be indicted before the tribunal of the people of South Africa.  It is time for us to carry that indictment and show their moral bankruptcy.  It is time for us to raise our voice to shout all that which the intimidated, still oppressed and fearful people of South Africa are now merely whispering. 

I have no fear.  I expect nothing from any-one.  I am one of the few South African leaders who has the benefit of wanting nothing from anyone, fearing nothing and expecting nothing.  Whatever is left of my life is not dedicated to me or to the pursuit of my own goals and ambitions.  In fact, since its beginning, my life has never served any other purpose than the one for which I was born.  It is not by fault, it is not by merit.  I was born into a mission and I carried it out to the best of my capabilities and with the humility of somebody who knew I had a task to perform which was much greater than me.  I was born for a purpose and tried to carry it out with zeal and total dedication.  The last leg of my journey may prove to be the most arduous but it may be the most rewarding because I realise that perhaps this is the time for which I have been preparing during the past sixty years of political engagement. 

This is the time in which South Africa needs me more than ever before.  This is the time when South Africa needs Inkatha more than ever before.  This is the time when South Africa needs all of you.  We will rise to this challenge.  We must turn the rapidly approaching government election into something more than the mere occasion of electing municipal Councillors.  In fact, whether we like it or not, the next local government election is already being viewed as having enormous political value beyond.  We must bring to the people of South Africa the message that the next local government election is one of the last opportunities available for the people of South Africa to speak up and express their vote of concern and dissatisfaction.  There must be an alternative to the unsatisfactory present and the uncertain future, and the IFP is that alternative.  The next local government election is the time when such an alternative can come to pass and its foundation can be placed for it to become a reality at the next general elections in 2009.

For this reason, it is essential that from this Conference we launch a great campaign to register voters and motivate voters to go to the voting stations.  We need to organise the logistics of the next local government election and ensure that all our branches become capable of carrying the burden of such an election at their own level in an autonomous manner.  Each branch needs to become responsible for the selection, payment and training of party agents and to run their own programs of canvassing and propaganda.  Everyone must realise that this effort is much broader than an election for local government.  Here is the time when South Africa must decide whether to accept the results of the crossing of the floor legislation and the rapid consolidation of a one-party state, or whether it would rather choose democracy. 

Democracy is about caring.  Our democracy is crumbling because those in power don’t care.  The next local government election is the time in which we must save our dying democracy and rescue our betrayed liberation.  The next election is going to be about local government but also about the future.  Let the message go out that if the people of South Africa want a democracy they must vote IFP.  If the people of South Africa do not want a one-party state, they must vote IFP.  If the people of South Africa want a government which cares, they must vote IFP.  If the people of South Africa want to rescue our betrayed liberation, they must vote IFP.  IFP is forever.  IFP is the future.  IFP is the only alternative.  IFP is all that the people of South Africa may rely on if they hope for a better future.  IFP is the depository and the source of moral leadership.  Inkatha belongs to all of you.