Johannesburg - President Jacob Zuma is a trickster and a manipulator who has taken the people of South Africa for granted. These are the reasons why even staunch members of his ruling ANC no longer trust him to lead Africa’s third-largest economy.
IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi made these assertions during a party event to mark National Youth Day in Soweto on Wednesday.
In the 22 years of democracy, “there has never been more distrust of political leaders than there is right now... the leaders in power have failed you”, he told a packed hall in Meadowlands Zone 10.
“You have been tricked and ignored. You have been manipulated and taken for granted. You have heard every promise under the sun, and none of it has amounted to anything,” said Buthelezi, a former minister of home affairs.
He said “surveys” showed that even within the ANC, “half their members distrust their own president”.
Zuma’s second term as ANC president ends next year. He has said he would not stand for a third term even if asked to do so.
Buthelezi, who started by paying tribute to the pupils who died on June 16, 1976 and laid wreaths at the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Orlando West, presented the IFP as a political party the electorate could trust.
“You can safely put your trust in the IFP because we have proven to be trustworthy. We have never made promises that could not be kept. We have never manipulated you to get your vote,” he said, urging people to vote for the IFP in the August 3 municipal elections.
Buthelezi called on his supporters not to accept financial mismanagement in municipalities, corruption, lazy civil servants and funding of failing state entities.
He characterised Zuma’s administration as a government that wouldn’t listen to the people, and drew parallels between it and the illegitimate and discredited apartheid government, saying it was the people who paid the ultimate price when the government failed to listen.
“The youth of 1976 faced a government that would not listen. The difference then is that there were no tools to make the government responsive,” he said, explaining that some of the tools pertained to the constitution, as it guaranteed justice and equality.
Buthelezi also touched on the recent burning of schools at Vuwani in Limpopo, characterising the crisis as a “tragedy of great magnitude”, and that some of the protests had nothing to do with service delivery. He said they were about the internal politics of the ANC.
“This chaos is being sown by the failure of an elected leadership to lead with integrity,” Buthelezi told the crowd, most of them decked out in school uniforms as a symbolic gesture to commemorate June 16, 1976.
And without naming any political party, Buthelezi, the former chief minister of KwaZulu-Natal during the apartheid era, said the destruction of public property was the “legacy of the gospel of some in 1976, who encouraged that the townships should be made ungovernable”.
In 1985, the ANC called township residents to make townships ungovernable by destroying the black local authorities.
@luyolomkentane
The Star