Forget committees and face up to the rot in KwaZulu-Natal

Don’t get me wrong. I like peace. I really, really, like peace.

The outbreak of peace anywhere, but particularly in the pitiful province of KwaZuluNatal, is a welcome occurrence.

Yet, sometimes one must ask oneself why peace is allegedly needed in a particular place when there has been no violence occurring there.

Are peace talks being held there just because some people want to seem important and relevant?

Let me explain. On Friday, the IFP’s president, Velenkosini Hlabisa, told the media that he had written to ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa asking that their parties each nominate three members from their top structures to form a joint body for “peace talks”.

This follows an incident 10 days ago when the ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal chair, Siboniso Duma, snatched a microphone from the Zulu king’s “traditional prime minister”, Thulasizwe Buthelezi.

Buthelezi had just started whining and whingeing about ANC provincial secretary Bheki Mtolo at a traditional ceremony attended by Ramaphosa and the Zulu king.

Hlabisa said he had received a letter from Mtolo on Wednesday “purporting to seek what he called ‘peace talks’ with the IFP”.

Hlabisa continued: “After careful consideration, I dispatched a letter to the president of the ANC, sharing how best we can deal with the KwaCeza incident, as he also commented about itin public.

“I requested that our parties nominate three members of our respective NECs and these three aside members will jointly facilitate the engagement of our PECs in KZN, to ensure that we deliver the sustainable and desired result.

“We are now awaiting the response from the ANC president.”

After he had reached out to Ramaphosa, Hlabisa then saw fit to respond to Mtolo, the ANC’s provincial secretary and a thorn in the IFP’s and the newly formed MK Party’s sides due to his spirited takedowns of both parties.

Why, one wonders, didn’t Hlabisa respond directly to Mtolo, the man who had written to him in the first place?

Now let me be clear that, after the microphone-grabbing incident, there was a minor fracas.

At least 16 people were injured and taken to hospital after the incident when IFP members, or alleged members of the king’s amabutho or “warriors”, attacked ANC members because they were “angry” that Buthelezi (the king’s “prime minister”), the king, and allegedly even Ramaphosa, were disrespected by Duma’s action.

Why couldn’t they contain their anger, one wonders?

Are they children, unable to use words to express their anger?

Why is their anger — at something as inoffensive as someone grabbing a microphone from another adult — being normalised?

Of course, no-one mentions that Buthelezi was totally out of order to bring his party-political whingeing to the Zulu king’s function and that his only job on the day was to say a few inane things and then hand the microphone to the king.

So that’s the context.

Yet here we are today forming a “peace committee” to ensure that there is peace in KwaZulu-Natal.

It’s all a sham, it seems to me — a ploy to raise the profiles of those who have run out of ideas.

Let me start with the IFP, a party that ran KwaZulu-Natal at the dawn of democracy and which held sway in the province for two decades before 1994.

In all its time in power, the IFP hardly shone as a paragon of service delivery.

Before 1994, it was a tool of the apartheid state, unleashing violence from its KwaZulu homeland enclave.

After 1994, it sat on its laurels in KwaZulu-Natal, doing sweet nothing except to enjoy the trappings of office.

After 1999, when it won 42% of the vote in the province, it was a lame duck — doing nothing and achieving nothing.

Except for its closeness to the Zulu monarchy, which it exploits ruthlessly, the IFP is a nothing party: no ideas, no leadership — just a dead man on its election posters.

Then there is the ANC. Using a tribalistic, chauvinistic, homophobic, rape-accused Jacob Zuma as its battering ram, it won an astonishing 63% of the vote in KwaZulu-Natal, and reduced the IFP to an embarrassing 22%.

It has done nothing with that incredible win except to collapse the province into a corrupt, Mafia-run, violent, crime-infested, impoverished and rapidly collapsing entity.

These two parties, these two losers, should be getting together to form an alliance to rid KwaZulu-Natal of corruption and the criminality that has led to the province’s collapse.

The province’s biggest challenge today is corruption, cronyism, gangsterism and political sloth.

Neither the ANC nor the IFP have established a commission or called a single meeting to solve these urgent problems.

Of course there is a threat of violence in KwaZulu-Natal.

The MK Party is threatening to unleash mayhem in the streets of the province.

The ANC and IFP should be identifying sensible leaders to work with in this new formation to denounce the bloodthirsty utterances of the likes of Visvin Reddy, Bonginkosi Khanyile and Zuma himself. Yet they are not doing so. Instead, they are establishing a committee for a problem that doesn’t exist.

Crazy.

It’s all a sham, it seems to me: A ploy to raise the profiles of those who have run out of ideas