Issued by: AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS KZN
ELECTION MANIFESTO 1999:KWAZULU-NATAL LAUNCH
SIBUSISO NDEBELE
Chairperson ANC (KZN), NEC member, MEC KZN (Transport)
ANC PREMIER CANDIDATE (KZN)
INTRODUCTION
From the 25th to the 27th of the last month Durban was host to the African Renaissance Festival. The three-day even saw the coming together of the people of KwaZulu-Natal in their magnificent diversity. Artists, poets, intellectuals, rural women and men in their fifties and sixties who have never been on stage before, youth, workers, tradition leaders, parliamentarians, academics, Africans, Indians, Whites and Coloureds, African-Americans, Deputy President, President - they all came. Why? The people of KwaZulu-Natal had said to themselves, to the country and to the world: if there is any province that needs a rebirth, a renewal, a renaissance and a new beginning - it is KwaZulu-Natal. They said that Europe has had its time, America has had its time, Asia is having its time. But the next millennium is the century of the African continent, of South Africa and of the province of KwaZulu-Natal. They are the people who have said to themselves: "We will win." The question is: who can stop us?
On Tuesday, 13th April 1999 a gathering of a different kind took place at the Durban Light Infantry hall. Those assembled for the the consecutive year were a living testimony to the truth that it is not possible to transform one's country without transforming oneself. These were men and women of rural KwaZulu-Natal attending a meeting made possible by the advent of a democratic South Africa in 1994.
These people are all devilment activists. They included 143 Amakhosi, Regional Councillors, rural women and men, teachers, school inspectors, religious leaders, engineers, technicians and other professionals. They included the youth: the same youth who had grumbled and rudely shuffled away when President Nelson Mandela called on them to throw away their guns, pangas and spears into the sea two weeks after his release from 27 years of imprisonment.
These are the men and women of rural KwaZulu Natal who have come to understand that:
They clearly understood that democracy, peace and development requires a group effort. You cannot be democratic on your own; you cannot be peaceful on your own and you cannot develop in splendid isolation but only through a dynamic interaction with others.
On Monday, 19th April 1999 the Mercury had a most depressing story on its front page. It read: "KwaZulu-Natal is the lousiest place to live in in South Africa, according to its people." The people of the province are recorded as the least satisfied, the least confident about the future and the province as the worst address in the country. One wishes that one could blame the bearer of this bad news and the reality would go away.
Unfortunately, by 1999, our Province has become one where the people are least inspired, are most pessimistic, are most fearful and are not excited about facing the challenges of democracy and the new millennium.
There was a time when this was not so.
THE HOUSE THAT LUTHULI BUILT
The ANC was declared an unlawful organisation and banned in April 1960. Under the national presidency and provincial leadership of Chief Albert Luthuli, deputised in the province by Cde Moses Mabhida, this was the most formidable and the most stable province in the country.
There was unity between African and African, whether urban or rural, educated and uneducated, the old and the youth. There was unity between African and Indian, and none saw each other as minority and majority. Indeed the word minority was exclusively reserved for the racist regime. To their credit Whites in the province had rejected the crass racism which apartheid shamelessly proclaimed.
Workers and their organised formation SACTU were acknowledged as legitimate champions of freedom and none who cherished the ideal of a free South Africa could visualise that without the freedom of the workers. It was for this reason that the PAC that the PAC that had swallowed the anti-Communist propaganda of the period as well as its reactive racism that said that to be is to be like the oppressor could not muster a membership of more than fifty. Similarly the Liberal Part could not thrive under the all-embrasive Luthuli leadership. It could be said quite correctly that what the true liberals wanted was already embodied in the ANC. Students and youth could realise their aspirations through the victory of the ideals of the ANC. Traditional leaders worked out strategies to defend their people against the National Party onslaught together with the ANC.
So it was that not only was the President of the ANC coming from this province but also KwaZulu-Natal was in the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. Her unity and clear vision was admired by all.
WHILE THE ANC WAS AWAY
Today, KwaZulu-Natal is like a young beautiful woman you were in love with as you both completed matric. Circumstances prevent her from proceeding, while you are lucky to go to university, complete and get a job. You meet her after five years. She has four and half children. The figure that you admired so much is gone. Because of the hard and rough lifestyle she has blotches all over her face.
You ask her how on earth she came to be this way and she answers with disarming simplicity: "IT IS BECAUSE YOU WENT AWAY". In her mind the answer is not made less valid by the fact that others who left in the same circumstances did not become this way. But, yes. But not this way.
The first objective of the apartheid state was to break the clear vision and unity existing in KwaZulu-Natal, a unity against apartheid which stretched beyond just the ranks of the ANC.
Some of the first targets were the whites in KwaZulu-Natal. Given the history of white Natalian opposition to the National Party - having voted overwhelmingly against the creation of a republic in 1961, having voted for opposition parties which ruled the Natal Provincial Council, and having voted against the Tricameral system - the National Party apartheid state did everything in its power to break the oppositional voice of white Natalians. The final nail was struck when the Natal Provincial Council was replaced as an elected structure with an executive structure controlled by Pretoria.
Indians instrike blows against the apartheid regime. The spears of Dadoo and Naicker were taken up by the student leadership at the University of Durban-Westville, the revival of the Natal Indian Congress and the active participation of Indian civics in the United Democratic Front. Decisive blows were struck against the National Party culminating in the complete rejection of the Tricameral system as measured by the turnout at the polls of 1983.
The coloured community of KwaZulu-Natal continued to identify closely with the African majority and show common cause, whether or not in trades union activities or opposition to apartheid sport?
During these dark years, resistance increased and in KwaZulu-Natal many formations led the charge against the apartheid state and monopoly capital.
The four pillars of our struggle were: the underground, armed struggle, international mobilisation and mass mobilisation. Up until the early 1970s there had been not much evidence of mass mobilisation.
The sleeping giant awakes!: I met Cde. Oliver Tambo in London two years after my release from prison in 1989. He told me of the excitement he and our other cde. leaders felt when Durban and later other towns in KwaZulu-Natal were brought to a standstill by the 1973 strikes. This was a political strike where workers had a very clear demand for the right to collective bargaining in a trade union of their choice. Workers continued to fight for basic rights of free association, organization and to improve their wages.
Anyone writing about the history of the working class in South Africa would from then onwards reckon time from before and after the workers strike of 1973.
It signalled that the time for izinduna and "boss-boys" was over.
The 1973 strikes paved the way for the Wiehahn Commission and the legal recognition of the trades unions in 1979.
Today, the ANC has got a strategic alliance with COSATU and the workers' party, the SACP. It is an open, principled alliance, forged in struggle against apartheid and continues now in our period of consolidating our democracy. But we are not the only ones with an alliance with COSATU.
After all, the majority of workers in the IFP are workers organised in COSATU.
And, show me one significant business house in KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere that does not have an alliance with COSATU. Show me one government department, whether headed by an ANC or IFP Minister or ANC or IFP or NNP Premier who does not have a formal recognition agreement with COSATU. So those who say the ANC should break with COSATU, do they want to remain as the only ones with a formal relationship with COSATU? How hypocritical!
The 1973 strikes opened the way for the mass democratic movement to mobilise against apartheid, from students to scholars to civics to peasants.
But throughout all of this there was no visible leadership. As such leadership emerged, it was arrested, detained, jailed, forced into exile or simply eliminated.
However, it was true to say that during these difficult years, while the state tried to take the people out of the congress, they could not succeed because you can never take the congress out of the people. As one fell, others grabbed the spear and kept alive the march towards victory.
KwaZulu-Natal suffered the worst excesses of the apartheid state during this period. More Indians and coloureds were forced out of their homes in the names of the Group Areas Act in KwaZulu-Natal than in any other part of our country. More Africans were forcibly removed from their birthplaces in KwaZulu-Natal than in any other part of South Africa. More people from KwaZulu-Natal were killed by the apartheid state than anywhere else in South Africa.
TO BREAK THE UNITY FURTHER
But, notwithstanding these apartheid excesses, the worst crime of the apartheid state was to divide the African people themselves. It did this through the homeland system where the Africans in KwaZulu-Natal were simply consigned to the KwaZulu homeland.
In 1972 the KwaZulu homneland was presiding over these aspects of African life: Interior, Roads and works, Education and Culture, Community Affairs, Agriculture and Forestry, Justice, Health and Community Affairs, Finance and Economic Affairs and Welfare and Police being added later on.
Thus the party that today heads this province has done so for at least 27 years. Its delivery and human rights record was dismal.
It is not a matter of pride to anyone in KwaZulu-Natal that some of the AWB who invaded and terrorised and were subsequently executed in Bophuthatswana came from this province. It is not a matter of pride that the majority party in this province only reluctantly and conditionally agreed to participate in elections on 19th April 1994, some eight days before the democratic elections.
All of this underlines how deep the divisions between African and African and African and white had gone in the house which Luthuli built.
But throughout the years, the ANC had always said that we would return.
CONGRESS IS BACK
By 1994 what was old was gone, what was new was too weak to be born. But even then we were able to explode certain myth. Contrary to what was being proclaimed by a hostile media and apartheid apologists, that all six million Zulus supported one political party, in the 1994 elections both the ANC and IFP got more than one million and less than two million votes each.
Up to 1994, the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal had known only defeat. From 1996, the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal has known only victory. For the 1996 local government elections, we set ourselves the goal of winning the most significant urban centres in the province. We did not just beat the IFP in the economic heartlands like Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Ladysmith, Newcastle, Richard's Bay and Mandini, but in most of them the IFP trailed as a poor number 3 or 4.
Ont he other hand, where we had not mounted a deliberate campaign in the rural areas in 1994, we still emerged as number 2, the second biggest party.
However, the ANC said we must not wait until we control the government of KwaZulu-Natal before we must ensure there is peace in the province. We understood also that peace couldn't be brought by the ANC alone. For this reason, we engaged seriously with the IFP that the primary responsibility of bringing peace depended on both the ANC and IFP. From 1996 we were engaged in the peace process with the IFP.
But we also went on a deliberate policy of creating islands of peace wherever the ANC won local government. We ensured that there would be genuine free political activity without any obstacles (such as refusing venues) being placed in the way of any party. We have been as good as our word.
CONSOLIDATE AND ADVANCE
Unlike in 1994 and 1996 there is no area in KwaZulu-Natal where our presence is not going to be felt. We are going to consolidate areas of known ANC support, not through preventing any party from canvassing support, but through having the confidence that we are a party of morel and ideological superiority.
And, we will be advancing to areas, which until now have not had the advantage of exposure to the liberating ideas of the ANC.
On thursda, I was asked by the President of the ANC to lead the campaign to win KwaZulu-Natal for the ANC. In my response I said the following:
"That which injures, instructs. KwaZulu-Natal has known conflict and has known pain. Political violence has been part of our past as South Africans up to 1994. In KwaZulu-Natal that violence has not only been part of our past. It is also part of our present. But it cannot be allowed to be part of our future.
It is my firm belief that though wars and conflict have wracked this province for more than a century, the present conflict is one which is closest to lasting peace.
But peace is a group effort. It is the responsibility of the ANC, her allies COSATU and the SACP. It is the responsibility of the IFP. It is the responsibility of the ANC and IFP working together, not against each other.
I therefore feel humnbled by the immense responsibility and trust that is today being laid on my shoulders by ANC President Thabo Mbeki, to work with all the people of KwaZulu-Natal to establish a government whose commitment to peace and development will be beyond question.
In 1994, the old was dead and gone, but what was new was too weak to be born.
KwaZulu-Natal deserves peace. It is time for a new beginning. It is time for the ANC.
I will spare nothing in my power to ensure that the trust that has been shown in me is not in vain."
IN KWAZULU-NATAL THE ANC IS YOUR:
With the support I have personally received from the PECs of the ANC, SACP and COSATU and of the calls we have received from diverse sectors of the people of KwaZulu-Natl, NOTHING CAN STOP US NOW!!!
25 APRIL 1999