ADDRESS BY
MANGOSUTHU BUTHELEZI, MP
PRESIDENT OF THE INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY AND MINISTER OF HOME AFFAIRS

Today is a great day in Port Shepstone. Today we have come to Port Shepstone to unleash the hope of the people of Port Shepstone. The people of Port Shepstone have the strength to hope for a better future. The people of Port Shepstone have the right to fulfil their hope for a better future.

We are here to begin a process which will transform today's hope into tomorrow's reality.

The whole of South Africa is ready for a change for the better. For too long the problems of South Africa have been ignored. South Africa is suffering under the yoke of grave problems. Our people are dying by the hundreds of thousands because of HIV/AIDS. Millions of people are affected or infected by HIV/AIDS. Their plight could have been bettered long ago, if they had been supplied with the full measure of treatment which medical science has made available. 

Tens of thousands of people would be alive today had they received the treatment they were entitled to. Tens of thousands of children would not now be orphans had our government woken up earlier to the problem of HIV/AIDS and the plight of those who are suffering from it. However, even in the middle of such great despair, there is now hope. The IFP has created that hope. The IFP has manufactured that hope.

Today we are here to strengthen the IFP and to launch a call to strengthen the IFP both provincially and nationwide so that hope may triumph.

Had it not been for the IFP, hope would not exist for many people who are now suffering from HIV/AIDS. It is because of the IFP that hope will triumph. We had to fight and struggle to achieve this result. We have not achieved the full measure of what is needed. We need more strength and greater support for the IFP in order to complete the job which remains unfinished. I was one of the first people in Parliament to state that government policies on HIV/AIDS were flawed. I have been extremely active in pushing for a change of policy. 

Over and over again in debates, I advocated that Government should not decide on matters of medicine, which ought to be left to medical doctors. It is not for Government to decide whether HIV causes AIDS and whether the drugs available for the treatment of its symptoms are safe or not. Only in the old autocratic and obscurantist communist Russia was government determining matters of science on the basis of political party policies.

Over and over again, the IFP has tried and succeeded in bringing pragmatism and morality into politics. It was the IFP's Premier of KwaZulu Natal, on instruction of our National Council and in close co-ordination with me, who challenged the policy of not giving Nevirapine to mothers, to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS to their newborn babies. 

He had to go so far as to intervene in a litigation before the highest court in the land, the Constitutional Court, to plead that it be allowed to do what the conscience and morality of any decent politician should dictate. He had to go to the Constitutional Court to plead that this Province be allowed to save its children by the hundreds of thousands. On the strength of the IFP, a wave of hope and moral regeneration has risen which demands that the problem of HIV/AIDS be taken seriously.

The South African people must think very seriously about how the problem of HIV/AIDS would have been dealt with more sensibly and appropriately, had the IFP been in power. Had the IFP been in power at national level, funding would have been made available a long time ago to provide for as many who need it as possible, with any type of treatment available to deal with HIV/AIDS and its symptoms. 

The central government has recently reached the same conclusion, but ten years later and, may be ten years too late. This delay has paved our cemeteries with endless graves and our families with untold sorrows. This is not the first and only time that the IFP has had to sway the ruling Party from its original position. On each occasion it moved away from its original position to embrace the IFP's position, but did so half-heartedly, haphazardly and with half-baked solutions. In the end, South Africa as a whole has suffered enormously. We have watched just this last week the machinations of the ANC's Spokesperson, Mr. Mtholeophi Mthimkhulu who accused the IFP of the very things that his party is guilty of, concerning failure to make anti-retroviral drugs available.

Had the IFP been empowered to govern, South Africa would not have suffered.

We are here to allow the hope to spring that a change may occur which enables the IFP to make a much stronger contribution towards the governance of South Africa. The IFP does not wish to govern by itself. Ours is not a quest for power, for the sake of power. We wish to be the catalyst of a broad coalition which enables the South African people to become the protagonists and the rulers of their own government. Our role is to enable the South African people to govern. The IFP by itself cannot solve all of South Africa's problems. However, as the spearhead of a coalition of willing parties which lead a revolution of goodwill, the IFP, together with the South African people, can indeed, solve most of South Africa's problems.

Together, we have the strength and resources to solve most of the many problems confronting South Africa. However, we must break the ANC's grip on power to ensure that the politics of divisions and exclusions are replaced by the politics of co-operation and unity. In this context, it will be possible for the voice of sanity which the IFP represents, to be heard more loudly, and with greater political resonance.

South Africa can no longer afford that our voice be heard only partially, and then soon forgotten. As few as ten years ago, the ANC still held strong socialist views and espoused a notion of a command economy, which would have spelled out disaster for South Africa. Step by step they began embracing the IFP's economic views. We have always believed in the importance of free-market enterprise and the need for fostering economic growth by liberalising market forces and unleashing the huge hidden potentials in the South African economy. 

Step by step the ANC has recognised the wisdom of this approach and has crossed over the fence from socialism into the ways of the modern and pragmatic world. However, one often sees that they crossed over the fence with their brain and have left their heart on the other side of it. Therefore, whenever courage, determination and political will are required to implement hard but necessary drastic measures, they run back to where they have left their heart, which is in the land of autocratic solutions shaped in the shadows of the defunct soviet system. In all this somersaulting It is the allies of the ANC, Cosatu and the South African Communists Party, who are continually putting a spanner into the works, as far as full privatization is concerned.

For this reason, they have not been able to go the full measure of what is required to promote economic growth. The ANC has embraced fiscal discipline and run a State budget in a manner which is sufficiently fiscally responsible, but have stopped short of moving ahead with liberalizing our economy, promoting productivity, creating flexibility in the labour market and providing real incentives for economic growth. Their failure to do so is immediately connected to the hundreds and thousands of South Africans who have lost their jobs since 1994. Because their heart still dreams in a land of a socialist utopia, more than half a million South Africans have lost the security, dignity and support of their jobs and their families are suffering. 

Since 1991, I have tabled in our debates the need to promote privatisation at the fastest possible speed, and on the basis of an economic, rather than political process. Also in this respect, they recognized the wisdom of what the IFP was proposing but they implemented only a small portion of what was required, to the point of not even wanting to call privatisation by its name, choosing to camouflage it under the different name of the restructuring of State assets. It is again the COSATU/SACP axis who are cramping their style. 

Once again, the ANC recognized that the IFP had the right medicine to heal South Africa's many ailments but, like a recalcitrant and spoilt child, they decided to take only half the measure of the required medicine. Because of this, the South African people continue to suffer. We must now ask ourselves whether the time has not come to give strength to our hope and empower a new leadership which has the sufferings of South Africans at heart, and is willing to do what it takes to make South Africa succeed, without being held to ransom by the Trade Unions Barons and the South African Communist Party. 

It is not for me to decide who should rule South Africa. It is for the South African people to make such a decision. Our priority is to move out of this rally with the message to all the South African people that it is for them to make their voices heard in nine months, when the next elections are going to be held. We must now plant the seed which conceives a process of gestation of a new great revolution in the making, which can bring hope to power in nine months. If I believe that hope can triumph, you must believe it with me. I believe that you all believe that hope may triumph.

Port Shepstone believes that hope can triumph. If, together, we can make Port Shepstone, KwaZulu Natal and South Africa believe that hope can, and will, triumph, then indeed, hope shall triumph. Politics is the only place in which by virtue of the strength of our shared beliefs, we can profoundly transform reality and make our own belief become tomorrow's reality. 

We need to ensure that all South Africans feel that they do have this power in their hands and that they carry the obligation to exercise it in nine months time. If they fail to do so, hope will die. If, in nine months, they fail to express what they believe in, then the possibility for a change will become elusive and Port Shepstone, KwaZulu Natal and South Africa will be bound to five more years of the same in an ever-generating spiral of unemployment, crime, corruption and problems such as HIV/AIDS, which are dealt with, not through actions, but by means of denial.

We need a government which governs by facing up to and solving issues, not a government which eludes the duty of governing by pretending that problems do not exist, or that they might just go away. For too long the HIV/AIDS problem has not been given the attention it deserves, whilst people were dying. For the moment there is no clarity on whether Government has, in fact, decided to roll out 100% cover of anti-retroviral drugs, or only 50% or 20%. At present we have no idea when such roll-out will begin. There is no reason why they should not have begun yesterday, but there are views that it ought only to begin in July 2004. 

I do not understand why people who are in desperate need of medicine, should wait for eleven months and, coincidentally enough, they should get their relief after elections. One must almost fear that this might be another example of the well-known pattern of promising, before elections, for delivery after elections, which delivery never takes place. The people who are suffering with HIV/AIDS do not require further denials or empty promises. They are saying very simply : show me the drugs!

Similarly, South African people are tired of hearing denials of the escalating situation of crime and lawlessness. We have all been victims of crime. I have been the victim of crime. My colleagues have been the victims of crime. It doesn't seem to stop. It doesn't seem to regress. 

Crime is an ever-growing industry. This problem is not going to be solved by hiding crime statistics. The South African people are asking government to show concrete measures. Crime can, and must, be solved. We need more policemen who are better paid, have better resources and are better trained.

We need more court rooms and more judges. We also need a massive campaign of education in all our communities to break the yoke of the culture of crime. We need to teach people to become good citizens and to give them a way out of the criminal mind-set. We need widespread programmes of civic education in our schools, workplaces and communities. All this is not beyond the capacity of our Government. It is not beyond the resources of our country. It is not beyond what our State spends on dealing with other priorities which, in real or imaginary terms, are threatening the lives of our people. It is not a matter of money. It is just a matter of political will. Our people are dying by the tens of thousands because of crime. 

They are dying by the hundreds of thousands because of HIV/AIDS. These are problems we can solve and we have got the money to do so. We must create the change which is now necessary to muster the political will which has thus far been lacking.

Our Republic is suffering. We need a profound moral regeneration to heal it. Our Republic is suffering because of corruption. The rule of law is not being upheld. Party political interest seems to override the rule of law. The expression "corrupted comrades" has become part of the new jargon of our democracy. All this is unacceptable, and unless stopped, will spell out the failure of our democracy. 

This is not the country for which I fought for more than fifty years of political struggle. I have always dreamt of a country which is free under the rule of law, and in which no one is allowed to escape from, or break, the law. We fought for the liberation of all South Africans, not for the enrichment of a few. We fought to build a country in which one day all South Africans may enjoy the same levels of economic prosperity and social stability which were once reserved only for a small rich and white minority. 

We must pursue that dream and heal our ailing Republic. In order to do so, the IFP must be stronger and a coalition of like-minded parties must give hope for democratic renewal. We need democratic renewal because we are now set to have five or ten more years of the same, which will spell out the death of our democracy. We need to change course towards a better direction and become agents of change.

We cannot rely on the ruling party to become an agent of change in its own strength and volition. Our democracy requires that the ANC be cut down to below the 49% threshold. South Africa requires a broad-based coalition of forces, which can only be empowered if the South African people have the wisdom to cut the ANC down to below 49%. It is not for my sake that this needs to be done. It needs to be done for the health and viability of that democracy for which we have fought for so many generations. There is no doubt that we are witnessing the gestation of an embryonic one-party State.

The ANC has mustered a 66% majority, not by virtue of the will of the people, but by means of political machinations and intrigues. With the strength of its 66% majority, the ANC now has the unfettered power to amend the Constitution. Our Constitution, for which we all fought so hard, has become irrelevant and can no longer protect us. This is not a fear. This is not a theory. This is not a threat. It is an undeniable reality which was proven by the fact that as soon as the ANC obtained the unfettered power to amend the Constitution, it exercised that power in the most reprehensible manner to gain more power for itself. The ANC amended the Constitution to allow the crossing-of-the-floor and change the rules of the electoral game, whilst the game was being played.

The Constitutional Court had declared that the legislation allowing the crossing of the floor after an election had taken place, was unconstitutional. The ANC did not care about that and merely changed the Constitution. They were ready to change the Constitution to such an extent that they made provision for a retrospective section, which would have enabled pre-identified people to be brought back into the KwaZulu Natal Legislature from which they had been expelled, because of their attempt of crossing the floor, under the unconstitutional legislation. This was a case of tampering with the Constitution of the worst type I have ever seen.

There was no public policy reason or need. It was about one thing, and one thing only, which was the ANC's ambition of seizing KwaZulu Natal, not through the ballot box, not through the will of the people, not through an election, but through tricks and legislative edicts. The ANC was not stopped in its tracks by the wave of moral indignation which arose throughout the country against this retrospective legislation. 

The ANC did not heed the moral call which emerged through each and every responsible newspaper and opinion-maker, calling on them to exercise restraint. They were hell-bent on getting KwaZulu Natal, by hook or by crook. They were only stopped when the people of KwaZulu Natal stopped them. They were only stopped when the Premier of KwaZulu Natal and the IFP were about to push the button which would have set in place an irretrievable process leading to an early provincial election in KwaZulu Natal. 

Even as I speak to you now, Mr. Ndebele, the ANC Leader in this Province, is involved in fierce negotiations with smaller Political Parties, in the KwaZulu Natal Legislature in his determination to become Premier of the Province, before next year's elections. He does not want any change that must take place to happen through the electoral process, but through promises of patronage and more.

One of these meetings has been scheduled by Mr. Ndebele for tomorrow, this in itself smack of political corruption of sorts.

The IFP has fought by the rules, to protect the rules. We resorted to the Constitution to protect the Constitution, which protects the freedoms and liberties of all South Africans. It was just seven hours before the IFP, with its allies in the Democratic Alliance, were about to pass a resolution to dissolve the KwaZulu Natal Legislature and trigger an early election, that the ANC agreed to withdraw the retrospective provision in its constitutional amendment. In the end, the ANC feared the verdict of the people of KwaZulu Natal. It feared how the people would have spoken if an election had been held early this year. It was a great triumph for democracy and yet, a very saddening moment for all of us, because it gave the final proof that the ANC, or for that matter any other political party with the unfettered majority to amend the Constitution, cannot be trusted.

We must now bring back hope to our democracy. We must infuse new hope in our Constitution. We must stop the gestation of the embryonic one-party State. There are no known cures against a one-party State. Once a one-party State has been consolidated it will need to run its course before it dies off, and as it does so, it will strangle our economy, squeeze our freedom dry and pillage the country. The only way of dealing with a one-party State is through prevention. There is no cure for it. We are the prophylactic. This medicine must be administered in large doses at the next elections to cut the ANC down to a size which does not threaten democracy, and to empower the IFP and its allies.

We are moving forward in bringing democracy to South Africa. Today, Port Shepstone flies the IFP flag. Tomorrow, the whole of South Africa will see more IFP flags flying in its stadiums, community halls and streets. Ours is not a flag which wants to divide people. Ours is a flag which wants to unite all South Africans of goodwill. With no doubt nor hesitation, if I were the next President of South Africa, I would invite into my Cabinet, both Mr Leon, who is now the Leader of the Opposition, as well as whichever representative the ANC may choose to contribute. 

I say this because I feel that South Africa must overcome the politics of division, and must bring on board whatever each party has to provide towards the better governance of South Africa. We need to forge a long-term vision on how the country needs to develop. We are competing in a global market which leaves no space for second acts and second-rate performances. We must make South Africa perform at its best. 

I know that South Africans have the strength, wisdom and the determination to out-perform any other country of the world. We lack and need training. We lack and need infrastructures. We need a long-term vision to bridge the gap between the extraordinary strength of the South African soul and mind, and all the things we do not have and which we need, to make South Africa a first-class performer. This long-term vision can only be formed on the basis of a social compact which brings all South Africans of goodwill together, to join hands together, to work together, not only today, but for the next 25 years that it might take to transform our vision into a new reality. We need a leadership capable of bringing this vision together and driving it through to success.

Since its inception, the IFP has always embraced the politics of inclusion, and never that of exclusion. We became the victim of those who waged war against us, because they were pursuing the politics of exclusion. We became the targets of their violence and intimidation, because they could not embrace our vision of a unified and peaceful South Africa. Throughout my life I have brought people together from across different walks of life.

In 1980 I brought people together across the then deep racial divides and in this Province we gave birth to the Buthelezi Commission. In 1983 I brought together the Black Alliance to oppose the divisive politics of the tri-cameral system because I believe in the politics of unity. In 1986 I launched the KwaZulu Natal Indaba which, in defiance of any law or paradigm of the time, brought the people of this Province together across racial and social divides, so that together we could take responsibility to govern this Province. In this Province the first inter-racial government of South Africa was born in the form of the Joint Executive Authority of KwaZulu Natal. 

Since 1996 I have been preaching the need for a revolution of goodwill to promote reconciliation and bring together all the people of goodwill across existing political divides. For this reason, the IFP is uniquely qualified to bring together all the springs of hope which are breaking through the sands of the present desert-like landscape of politics in which, until now, disillusionment, despair and indifference seem to be prevailing. There is now hope for those who felt that politics had nothing to offer to them anymore. The hope is that we can, indeed, produce a leadership capable of and willing to take head-on and solve the problems of crime, unemployment, corruption, poverty and HIV/AIDS.

Existing political parties do not necessarily represent how people feel. The next elections should not be about political parties, but rather about enabling people to send out a loud and clear message to those in government, to let them know how they feel. For this reason, it is essential that all those who are here today take it upon themselves to become ambassadors of goodwill. You must move out of here and tell the people of South Africa that they have a last chance to get our country right. You must tell the people of South Africa that they must vote at the next election, and that they must do so in order to have their voice heard. Voting cannot be an act of allegiance. It cannot be the expression of an ancient debt of gratitude.

Those who voted for the ANC in the past are not bound to do so again, unless they want to have five more years of the same. If they have the strength to hope and the will to change, they, themselves, must change how they vote.

It is your responsibility to tell the South African people that they are free to vote as they choose, and that they must vote to make South Africa change so that our children may, indeed, have a better life than the one we now have. Dare we not bequeath on our children the legacy of the HIV/AIDS genocide, rampant and ever-escalating crime, growing unemployment, unfettered corruption and rising levels of poverty. 

Dare we not look into the face of these problems and do nothing about it. Dare we not fail to have the courage to demand and produce change. The power to change lies in the power to vote, and to vote differently. Since its inception, the IFP motto has been "democracy means the power to choose". The time has come for this motto to change South Africa by making people realize that, indeed, they have this power on election day.

There are times in which leaders are the protagonists of history and it is their responsibility to make history unfold in one direction or the other.

Most of the liberation movement was driven by leaders with the support of their people. The time has now arrived in which it is for the people to lead. Today, the people are providing their leadership by choosing to make Port Shepstone an IFP city, which is committed to change and is willing to be a champion in our struggle for change. When elections come, the South African people will be called on to lead the course of history and become their leader's leader. I am a servant of the people. 

Throughout my life I have done nothing but serve the will of the people. I have been with the people all my life and never abandoned them. I know what the people need, because my heart beats at the same pace as their needs and aspirations. I know that South Africa needs more economic growth, more employment, less crime, less corruption, more attention to rural areas and rural poverty and far much more attention to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. I know that the South African people need less excuses, less denial, less enrichment and less high-flying parasites. 

We need the IFP to lead a campaign of moral regeneration, based on hard work and the willingness to serve. I am here to serve. The IFP is here to serve. With our service the people will triumph.