IFP looks like ANC’s natural ally, but times are changing

In the days following the announcement of the election results in 1999, the ANC and the IFP began informal talks about working together in government. At national level, the Thabo Mbeki-led ANC had scored a landslide victory increasing by 14 the number of parliamentary seats the party held during Nelson Mandela’s tenure as president.

With 62.65% of the vote, the party fell just short of a two-thirds majority and certainly did not need the help of any other party to form a government.

But it had a problem in KwaZulu-Natal. Once again the party had failed to win the province, gaining only 32% of the vote while the IFP won 34%.

With the other parties doing far worse, it seemed clear to most observers that the best route to a stable provincial government was for the IFP and the ANC to join hands.

The IFP, which had held the provincial premiership since 1994, was insisting on continuing to do so on the grounds that it had two percentage points more of the vote than the ANC.

The ANC on the other hand wanted its then provincial leader, Sbu Ndebele, to become premier in return for the national cabinet posts that would be given to the IFP. A stalemate ensued as both parties refused to budge.

But then on the weekend ahead of the presidential inauguration and the formation of the new government, Mbeki proposed a radical solution. He’d appoint IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi as deputy president in return for the IFP leaving the premiership to Ndebele.

The proposal was sold as a decisive step towards the reconciliation of the two parties whose followers and members had been embroiled in bloody conflict for almost two decades. Some even saw it as opening the path for a future “reincorporation” of the IFP into the broad national liberation movement led by the ANC.

In the 1970s, before his falling out with the then exiled ANC president Oliver Tambo, Buthelezi had sold Inkatha as some kind of an internal wing of the banned organisation. Now with apartheid gone and the differences over how to fight the racist system no longer relevant, people on both sides were arguing that there was no need for the two to exist as separate entities.

Hence Mbeki’s suggestion had their backing and Buthelezi sounded amenable, though he still needed to get the buy-in of his followers.

But the deal would not have been without casualties. For starters Lionel Mtshali, the then IFP premier, wouldn’t have been impressed by the idea that he would have to make way for an ANC rival.

Most importantly, the deal would have meant that the then ANC deputy president, one Jacob Zuma, would miss out on becoming the country’s second-in-charge.

These factors resulted in the Mbeki-Buthelezi deal being scuppered. The leaking of the story to the media just hours before Buthelezi was to fly from Pretoria to Ulundi to obtain his party’s endorsement resulted in opponents of the deal mobilising support against it.

The two parties still formed a coalition government at provincial level with Mtshali as premier and Ndebele, with three other ANC leaders, taking up positions as MECs.

At national level, Mbeki invited Buthelezi, Ben Skosana and Ben Ngubane into his cabinet.

With various surveys confirming that we are most likely to have a coalition government at national level next year, the ANC must have started looking around for possible future partners.

Although the IFP is a signatory to the multiparty charter, whose members’ objective is to unseat the ANC at next year’s polls, Luthuli House strategists will be hoping they can still win over the party after the polls.

According to a recent survey by the Brenthurst Foundation, ANC support has dropped to 41% while the IFP stands at about 7% nationally. In KwaZulu-Natal, the survey puts the ANC at 32% and the IFP at 27%. This means the two parties could form a coalition government on their own in KwaZulu-Natal and could probably do so, with the help of smaller parties, at national level.

For the ANC, especially if it remains averse to entering into coalition negotiations with the EFF, the IFP route seems like the best option.

But the IFP may decide to stick it out with its partners in the Multiparty Charter, even though the Brenthurst survey and a number of others suggest charter signatories would get no more than 36% at national level and only 46% in KwaZulu-Natal.

The wild card in all of this is IFP leader Velenkosini Hlabisa. Despite all the differences it had with Buthelezi, the ANC always knew that when the chips were down it could bank on Buthelezi’s political roots in the party. He was never ready to totally walk away.

Hlabisa has no similar history and his choice of allies may purely be based on what works for him and his leadership collective, with little thought for historical ties or a sense of belonging to a broader national liberation movement.