Brussels

8 December 2009

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 marvellous 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 things 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 did 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 savoir-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.