The relationship between the ANC and the IFP is complicated. They’ve been in bed together. They’ve fought like lovers scorned. They’ve been divorced. And remarried. They’ve hurled abuse at each other from opposite sides of the House, yet happily played footsie under the table. They’ve played the infatuation of the EFF and the DA like fiddles. Yet again, it looks like the ANC and the IFP only have eyes for each other. The latest courtship started with a birthday card.
The new kids in town under Siboniso Duma have been eager to make friends and lovers. Generous birthday wishes to IFP President Emeritus Mangosuthu Buthelezi received a warm reception. Both gestures appeared genuine. Duma was eager to lower the political temperature in the province and put the brakes on a rapidly advancing IFP. Buthelezi, ever the genteel grandfather, blushed. He knows the score. He’s a master tactician and Lothario rolled into one. Ask ANC and IFP insiders and both will giggle that love seems to be blooming again, a few petty squabbles notwithstanding.
Earlier this week an angry missive from Dr (sic) Pixley ka Isaka Seme headquarters took the much-applauded Gift of the Givers Foundation to task for apparently skewing its food aid to IFP supporters ahead of the heavily contested Ward 12 by-election in the uMhlathuze Municipality. Few would pay any attention to the claptrap from the ANC’s keyboard apparatchiks. The only fraudulent reference in that diatribe was to give ANC founder Seme a grand title that he misled people into believing he had earned. Whatever the little tiffs, the ANC and the IFP desperately desire each other.
The cancer of the EFF
There is just so much cream on the KwaZulu-Natal wedding cake and it cannot be a feast for outsiders. The IFP’s illicit tryst with the EFF to hold on to several municipal councils will forever be in troubled waters. Give Julius Malema your heart and he will want to pluck liver and kidneys too. Like Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Malema wants only a pound of flesh. His fiendish desire is for absolute and unfettered power. Malema’s red army is as dangerous as Hitler’s Blackshirts. Its brand of extractive and extortionist politics subverts the democratic process. The EFF must be stopped. A constitutional state tolerates fascism at its peril.
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As the ANC and the IFP get cosy, Malema has been left whimpering. EFF sleeper cells within the ANC have been advising the new leadership to open the door to the EFF. Though love might be blind, the EFF is a cancer that spreads like wildfire once it takes a bite. There are bigger stakes to play for. Duma will quickly need to grasp that there is nothing exceptional about the ANC in KZN. The province holds no special cards.
Factionalism in KwaZulu-Natal ensured that other provinces secured themselves in the Top Six leadership at Nasrec. Come the national elective conference in December, it is as clear as day that KZN will be out in the cold again if it does not get its act together. It will be foolish to roll out Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma for another consolation prize.
While other provinces have their machinery in overdrive, KZN is crippled in the mistaken prayer that Jacob Zuma is some kind of lucky charm. If the youthful Duma is to realise the national aspirations that are there for his taking, he will cut Zuma loose. That will be a hard break to make, especially as the new provincial executive committee appears beholden to Zuma and his lieutenants. To make meaningful progress, the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal needs to leave Zuma to his personal troubles and his harem. That is a love affair that has gone horribly wrong.
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The IFP will go into the 2024 elections stronger than it was a decade ago. So many things have gone wrong so quickly with the ANC in the province. Though former chairperson Sihle Zikalala might have kept his own hands clean, he presided over a corrupt, calcified and divided party. Zikalala’s political trajectory was also cut cruelly short by the ambivalence over Zuma.
Duma needs to be wide awake to the elementary lesson that Zuma is bad news. As the five-a-side ilobolo negotiators quietly get down to planning the coalition, the smitten Duma will be beating a path to Mahlabathini for tea and spurning the poisoned chalice at Nkandla. Strange things happen when you’re in love. DM168
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.
It is rich to call South Africa a Constitutional state without giving clear features or characteristics of such. To throw words and concepts with little thought as to their meaning and relevance is very dangerous and one thought that is an ANC pastime only. We may be an aspirant constitutional state but we have hardly reached that point on the record of the conduct of what ought to be the constitutional institutions of this country. To label EFF fascist and ignore the ANC fascism is wrong. A constitutional state means a parliament that is independent of the executive and has the ability to hold the executive to account. Our constitutional framework has given birth to state capture precisely because
parliament has failed to hold the executive to account. Thee examples that confirm the concerns of Zondo, you have parliamentary committee that clears Mkhize and the SIU and courts do not and you have a parliamentary committee clearing a confirmed thug called Kodwa on Phala Phala when the President has failed to answer questions and the very ANC point to coming process but already is clearing people on Phala Phala! Makhura has no constitutional powers to declare proclamation for SIU and he constantly does so! The charade in the Senzo Meyiwa case does not happen in a Constitutional state as Batohi would have been shown the door. We may have elements of a Constitutional state but we are not. Mervyn Dirks would not have been suspended if it were so because it would be criminal.