Speech by
Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, MP
PRESIDENT OF THE INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY

I am delighted to be here with you today and to have been afforded the opportunity to address this Conference on Political Culture in South Africa. I would like to thank the Konrad Adenauer Stifftung and St Augustine College for making this forum available. The Konrad Adenauer Stifftung has played an indispensable role in the strengthening of democracy in South Africa and, indeed, the establishment of a fledgling democratic political culture.

In my address I would like to consider the impact of political intolerance, the floor-crossing legislation and the evolving de facto one-party state upon the political culture in South Africa. But before I evaluate these factors, it is relevant to state that the dynamics of political culture in the new South Africa have their roots in the struggle for political liberation.

In the highly contested struggle for political liberation, it was not democratisation that was the priority of the ANC and its associates, but, to use that favourite hawkish buzzword, regime change. Unquestioning loyalty to the movement and the shaping of a single liberation narrative have defined today's ruling political elite in which state and party are equated.

Unity for the ANC in the struggle was synonymous not only with its internal unity, but with the unity of all the liberation movements. The ANC conceived the armed struggle as the lightening rod for establishing its political hegemony after liberation. We, in the IFP, on the other hand, advocated a diversity of roles within the liberation movement as the basis for political pluralism after liberation.

The ANC's post-liberation pursuit of the 'national democratic revolution' since 1994 has had a far-reaching impact upon our political culture. As the ANC would not accept the IFP vision of unity within the liberation movement expressed in a diversity of roles before 1994, today the ruling party expects uncritical consensus around particular programmes of social action.

The ruling-party's view is that opposition parties should not be 'adversarial' or 'confrontational' but 'constructive'. If the opposition fails in this test, it is often typified as being counter-revolutionary; regressive; unpatriotic; racist or 'not African'. The latter two labels, I am happy to say, are pejoratives that the ANC have found difficult to pin to me.

The nasty opprobrium, nevertheless, directed at me from a leading member of the ANC, when I said in Parliament that levels of rural poverty are worse now than a decade ago, is indicative of the pitifully low level of tolerance in our political culture. This is despite my statements being underpinned by incontrovertible statistical evidence and a solid body of academic work.

Paradoxically, the majority of ANC supporters remain poor and, yet, as the 2004 election results reveal, they seem to offer solidarity-based support to the ANC government - despite a sharp decline of over a million votes cast for the ruling party - based upon their liberation credentials and identity. This is contributing to the unhealthy solidification of our political culture.

It is, of course, timely that we are discussing this important question during the floor-crossing window. This legislation, I believe, is the most undemocratic piece of legislation - and there are some strong legislative contenders - to have been passed since 1994. The legislation passed in 2002 is a clear demonstration of the ANC's hegemonic impulse and poses a dangerous threat to our political culture. The legislation envisaged the removal of opposition parties from office in the two provinces, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, which were outside the orbit of ANC control.

The rules of floor-crossing legislation since 2002 have been overwhelmingly stacked in favour of the ruling party, not least because of the stipulation that 10 percent of a party caucus has to cross the floor. This means that only three members of my party would need to defect together against the unlikely scenario of 28 members of the ruling-party defecting together to one opposition party at a time.

Now that the ANC enjoys unlimited power in all nine provinces, the opposition faces a huge task in protecting South Africa's political culture. We will need to strengthen Parliament's public policy oversight role, particularly at a time when the principle of the separation of powers is coming under increasing strain.

Even more fundamental than this, however, is the need for an organic democratic culture characterised by tolerance to emerge if South Africa is to make the successful transition from a procedural to a consolidated democracy.

For whilst the institutional framework of democracy has been established in South Africa, including a progressive constitution, a functioning parliament and an independent judiciary, the progress towards developing the cultural components of democracy, particularly political tolerance, has been painstakingly slow.

If one defines tolerance as the willingness to allow all groups, irrespective of their political viewpoints, to compete for political power through legal and peaceful means, it is clear that neither the level nor the distribution of intolerance in South Africa is conducive to democratic governance.

The IFP, undoubtedly, has been a victim of political intolerance with our support base often being stigmatised as being 'tribal' and 'regressive' by the ruling party, sections of the media and academics alike, despite being an important actor on the main stage of national and regional politics. The IFP continues to face an uphill task in countering the high level of political intolerance against it.

The third and final factor, I would like to consider is the impact of an evolving de facto one party state upon our political culture. Despite a slippage in real numbers of support, the ANC's solidarity-based support, as I have mentioned, suggests that the ruling party does not have to worry about a threat to their power.

The ANC may have won 70 percent of the popular vote in the 2004 general election, but, in real terms, it has confidently exercised 100 percent of the political power. This means that the one party-state is not a menacing prospect, as many observers keep suggesting, but a disconcerting reality we all need to come to terms with.

This view of the political reality in today's South Africa, which I share, has been vindicated many times and with increasing intensity. The South African public has been an unwilling witness, through often biased media coverage, to a number of blatant subversions to our democratic framework. We have seen Oilgate, Travelgate and Arms Deal unravel what our Constitution had tried so hard to establish.

The current argument about multi-party democracy in South Africa is therefore not about its relative importance, but rather its sheer survival. It is not the self-proclaimed victors of the liberation struggle in the ruling party who keep our democracy alive. It is us on the opposition benches. Our own survival is indeed the survival of multi-party democracy.

And we can only survive in a political culture with flourishing tolerance, a culture only we can assist the ruling party to recreate, maintain and perpetuate.