DURBAN 11 JANUARY 2003
Just as we celebrated the ushering in of the New Year, on Thursday, January 2nd, 2003, Vusi Mzimela, a great warrior and combatant, an exceptional patriot and leader, passed on to another world, where only the gods and the spirits live eternally.
Thus it was to be that he would miss the great theatrics of the following week occasioned by the devastating IFP paranoia and desperate obsession with Premiership.
What a performance were we to see during this week as we were treated to IFP brinkmanship and comical political strategies, rich in opportunism and convenience and short on every other thing!
Merely because of opportunism and convenience, the IFP fully embraced the Democratic Alliance as an ally.
Vusi would have been happy that some solution was eventually found that prevented the dissolution of the provincial legislature.
But, he would have warned, the problem is not over, but postponed. The challenge still remains to re-build the relations between the ANC and IFP so that we continue to work together to fulfil the objective to unite and address the needs of the masses of our people who are dreadfully poor.
What has been brought into sharp focus is that the IFP's commitment to working with the ANC is not based on the principle to unite black people and pursue their aspirations; it is based on what is in it for the IFP's elite.
So, the day for reckoning is still coming; whether it came on Wednesday or was postponed to another day, it is coming!
Let us be clear! The dissolution of the legislature would have brought closer the inevitable defeat of the IFP in this province!
Our own task in this province, as throughout the whole country is clear - to break down and destroy the old order!
The choice the IFP has made to turn its back on the ANC and to collaborate with the DA, the enemy of our people's freedom that sustains its existence through perpetuating the backward ideas of white supremacy, will precipitate its early demise.
It was this backward philosophy of white supremacy that resulted in the most evil acts of the most extensive human oppression and exploitation of black people, and especially Africans, who were regarded as sub-human and as beasts of burden, providers of cheap labour, there only to fulfil the unending greed for profit among white people.
For centuries, white people, English and Afrikaner alike, regarded it as their supreme and sacred destiny to rule and exploit the resources of this country with the savagery and barbarism that would surely have shamed even the animal kingdom.
To achieve this purpose, they mobilised and relied on black collaborators for their evil schemes to smash black unity and create fertile conditions for our perpetual oppression and exploitation.
The defeat of white supremacy and the capture of political power over the whole of South Africa created the crisis of all crises, the mother of all horrors, and occasioned the formation of the DA in 1999.
The unstated purpose of this new Alliance was to unite the former white establishment for the objective to wage a counter-revolution to defeat non-racialism and fundamental reconstruction and development.
As soon as it was formed, we made the correct observation that this marriage was destined for an early explosion.
With the departure of the NNP, our prophesy fulfilled, the DP arrogated to itself the right to be the sole representative of white supremacy and custodian of white minority interests in our country.
Having approached us and made the request before 1999 elections that it would like to remain in government with us, to which we agreed because of our belief in the principle of black unity, the IFP has acted in absolutely bad faith and have betrayed the tactics of Bantustanism riddled with sheer and blatant opportunism, fear for the future, brazen dishonour and cowardice.
I must reiterate the fact, much contrary to Premier Mtshali's phantasms in the legislature on Wednesday, we have no fear for democratic elections which we would have won hands down, were they called!
That the IFP has thrown itself heart, body and soul into a disgraceful anti-ANC alliance with the party of white supremacy is completely shameful.
In the ANC, it had the rare opportunity to cleanse itself of the stains of having, in the past, collaborated with apartheid in carrying out much of its dirty work, but it has chosen to abandon so quickly this path of honour in preference for an organisation that was living in cold isolation, abandoned by everyone, save for the most backward elements among white people and the most stupid among black people.
In his hallucinations in the legislature on Wednesday, Mtshali spoke of 'protecting democracy and will of the people', both of which he and his party know absolutely nothing about.
I am sure that his apartheid friends in the DA will tell him that crossing the floor is as democratic as democracy can be.
I hope somebody will eventually wake him up to the reality that in jumping into the DA's hands and bed, the IFP acted completely out of fear that their own members have no allegiance to the IFP and another baseless fear that losing to the ANC would mean losing the Premiership.
And, I am sure someone will someday crack through his skull to convince him that the IFP had not won KZN in 1999 and that the government of KZN constituted jointly by the ANC and IFP had received its mandate from the people that it should co-govern the province. The IFP alone had no such mandate!
Mtshali is Premier today on KZN, thanks to the ANC! In throwing him a lifeline on Wednesday, we extended his Premiership, but only by approximately 12months. It will soon end, he knows!
The IFP-DA alliance will, like its predecessor, end nowhere!
Fear and short-sightedness caused the IFP to give two critical responsibilities at the heart of ensuring that we fulfil the objectives both that "The People Shall Share in the Country's Wealth" and that "There Shall Be Houses, Security and Comfort" to that godfather of racism, the DA.
By so doing, both the IFP and DA have ensured that all the work done in the previous years fundamentally to transform both the economy as well as our human habitat shall be reversed in favour of the DA's constituency that fears and hates change!
Surely, racist South Africa is applauding Mtshali for his foolish acts. The hidebound white supremacists see this act of desperation and opportunism on the part of the IFP as a demonstration of firmness and a determination to protect racial privileges and backwardness at all costs.
They are convinced that Mtshali will succeed to keep the advancement of transformation at bay, to prevent from dawning the day of the glory and total emancipation of our people!
We should, here warn him that, clearly, the sands are shifting and things cannot go on in the same old way; change is imminent!
The IFP brinkmanship created and precipitated an unnecessary crisis and, without cause, heightened emotions in KZN.
The youth have no option but to reject this through intensifying the struggle to make it impossible for these leftovers of apartheid to govern.
Using the combined strength of the progressive forces, acting together as a broad front for transformation, we must defeat the schemes of those backward forces in the IFP who, in their mortal fear for progress and change, seek to infest the rest of the IFP with their fear.
We must so act as to give strength and courage to the healthy forces within the IFP who are ready to live a life of progress to move this organisation away from this morass.
Comrades,
Whilst we know that even this New Year will soon pass, and become part of our past, confirming our own mortality, we also know that Vusi has now been lifted to a new life form, and become part of our strange future, where he lives forever, confirming a form of our own immortality.
We have thus converged on this grieving piece of earth, therefore, to pay tribute to and salute a highly decorated warrior and commander, a special person who had occupied a special place in the lives of many young people, one whose life touched in a special way millions of other lives!
In him, the youth of South Africa had a leader, a hero and an icon!
So rare was this human being that, in him, combined a pioneer, an organiser, a warrior, a leader and yet a loyal and disciplined follower.
The tale we shall tell is of a human handicraft that our people themselves had, through their struggles, created; the model of a new person of the future that graced South Africa in her past and present, illuminating our path, showing us the way!
When we proclaim him a hero, it is because he was an ordinary person who performed extraordinary deeds.
He was a hero because his entire life had been selflessly devoted to the cause of his people.
He was a hero, not because he had had no fear in his heart, but precisely because he had learned to surmount his own fear and had learned not to allow it to cripple him and make a coward out of him!
His passionate hatred for and opposition to apartheid and all forms of oppression had moulded him into a person that was free of fear, a person that could bravely interpret and articulate the aspirations of his people thus earning their admiration and adoration.
He was the first to volunteer for duty, no matter how difficult and dangerous.
He had, in his lifetime, never sought solace in the world of the cowardly and the wayward. For many years, the struggle and the movement had placed enormous demands on him and he, in turn, always obliged, whatever the demands and whatever the sacrifices required.
As he passed on, we still had so much expectation of him, but our expectation hath, to this day, an end!
To praise him is only made worthwhile by the fact that his was a life spent in pursuit only of worthy and noble causes.
To say thank you to him is not to gratify a personal ego, to bluff the grieving family and a late friend and comrade, but it is to convey a heartfelt gratitude we feel towards a departed hero.
To call him a hero is to acknowledge, without envy, his role and contribution to the progress of our struggle and our nation.
At the conclusion of his life, he can, like that 19th Century Cuban revolutionary, visionary, poet and author, Jose' Marti, say,
"I have lived:
It was to duty that I pledged my arms
And not once did the sun drop down behind the hills
That did not see my struggle and my victory..."
He too could rightfully claim these words, for our sun saw his struggle and his victory as he toiled every day pursuing the cause of his people.
He belonged in that incredible group of people with whom our struggle was on many occasion blessed, to whom the struggle was not just a duty, it was a calling, those bright lights that shone on our horizon that served the cause of their people without expecting material rewards in return.
All his life, he served the youth of our country, mobilising them for the critical challenges of the struggle and, at the same time, championing their development.
As a young person himself, he identified with their innermost feelings, thoughts and aspirations, gifted as he was with the ability to interpret and articulate their specific experiences and aspirations.
He could command them into action and inspire them to perform heroic acts.
Today, we are a people whom death has reminded of their mortality, that we shall, each one of us, one day face our demise.
Those who oblige with the calling of their existence, who pursue their true life's mission, are not rare breeds or supernatural or extraordinary beings. They are ordinary mortals like you and me who take to life with a remarkable sense of duty and purpose.
The heroic deeds they perform, when considered closely, are just ordinary deeds performed by ordinary beings.
But, ironically, this is exactly what makes these ordinary mortals so extraordinary immortals.
Vusi was human as they were fierce and focused in his pursuit of the single goal of our emancipation, guided by the knowledge and conviction that his people were not sub-human.
For him, poverty and underdevelopment, marginalisation and social dislocation were not the stations of destiny for their people.
It was this loyalty to the most noble value systems of his people that made Vusi so extraordinary and so supreme. He valued life and cherished freedom and equality. He possessed no yearning for revenge and aspired for universal human emancipation and freedom.
Some, who had not known this Vusi Mzimela that our people and youth, in particular, had known and adored for so long, would never understand why he was so militant and valiant on the battle-field as he was soft, sweet and loving in his personal life.
Here was a true human being, completely humane and passionate both in love and in his fearless and steadfast pursuit for freedom and justice!
He was born of and was a direct product of the concrete conditions of life of his people and their struggles for freedom.
So it came to pass that Vusi fought against apartheid and became one of the movement's pre-eminent mass organisers that could stir a docile people, full of fear, into unimaginable action.
All this he did with a youthful spirit that is hard to imagine and describe.
It is precisely for that reason that he worked so hard to address both youth mobilisation and development.
He had believed both that the youth should be developed in order to empower them for the titanic challenges of building a new society and that they should be mobilised, themselves to continue to act as agents for change, catalysts for genuine development.
He was as militant as he was disciplined, convinced that militancy and discipline were two sides of the same coin without which our struggle could not succeed and the youth could not have played the role they did.
Given all this, it is only fair that our people should grieve and mourn at the loss of so shining a sparkle. It makes sense that the youth should feel a terrible sense of desolation at the loss of he who was both a role model and shining star in their eyes.
Surely, we will all agree that he deserves the honour and respect that our people shall attribute to him.
His passing away offers us as a nation and together with the youth the opportunity really to focus on the future and discern the path towards that future, a future free of poverty and deprivation.
It was worthwhile that he struggled for our freedom. He is worthy of our accolades. It is correct to wish him to rest in peace.
On such an occasion as this one, I urge you to allow me to strike a personal note.
I am one of those people who today mourn the demise of not just a comrade but of a loyal friend; having had the honour to be counted among your friends.
I, therefore, spoke today both as your leader and also as your friend.
I feel all the more the painful agony of the void created by your loss.
As your leader, I am a leader that you helped to shape, never reserving sharp criticism for the many mistakes I made.
As a friend, I shared many a joke with you, the anguish of seeing illness slowly and gradually overwhelming you as well as the strength as I watched you relentlessly fighting it with warrior-like courage.
I owe a lot to your friendship and your own leadership. I am proud, therefore, today, to call you my Leader!
Among those most overwhelmed by your sudden departure is our dear Sister, Lindiwe, and your children.
Like a good ancestor, look after them as they looked you, shower them with blessings and give them the strength, courage and wisdom to face the challenges of the life and the future without you victoriously.
To them and to the rest of the families of amaNguni namaMntungwa, our movement conveys its collective condolences and expresses its indestructible gratitude at the fact that you happily and with open hearts surrendered your own son to the nation.
For your service and your commitment to our freedom so that we may have our dignity restored and be human again, the Nation Salutes you!
Even now, we can hear your voice shout,
Amandla! Matla!
Afrika Ke Nako!
Long live the ANC!
Aluta! Continua!
Glory be to the struggling masses of the African Continent!
Let there be Peace and Friendship Among the Peoples of the
World!
Lala ngoxolo, Qhawe lamaQhawe!
Issued by: African National Congress KZN