This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.
04 Nov 1996: Matthews, Joe
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POM. You have just made an observation that the quietest place in South Africa until recently had been the Transkei and that it is now one of the places experiencing most turmoil. You were about to give an explanation as to why you thought that was so.
JM. Yes, I think myself that previously the area was basically ruled by five Paramount Chiefs, as we call them, and they really looked after the area in terms of security, solution to various disputes and so on, they were the judges and they had the tribal administration under their control. Now that was the Pondos, what we call Eastern Pondoland which is run by the brother of the Minister of Public Enterprises Stella Sigcau. Her brother Mpondombeni is the Paramount Chief and incidentally is the Paramount Chief of Winnie Mandela. She comes from that part of the world, Eastern Pondoland. Then you had Western Pondoland, which is run by Tutor Ndamse who is the Paramount Chief, then Kalekaland which is run by a Chief named after ... Sigcau, his name is Sigcau but actually the surname is Zwelithumile, he's the Chief of the Kaleka, Paramount Chief. Then the Paramount Chief of the Tembus, that's the Paramount Chief of President Mandela and others, the Tembu Paramount Chief. Then Western, what we call emigrant, Tembuland which is run by the former President of Transkei, Chief Kaiser Matanzima.
. Now when they were running the place the social system based on traditional customary law, people knew where they were, there was certainty and so on. Then we introduced democracy and in fact the impression is created that the days of Chiefs and Paramount Chiefs are over and you are now going to have elected local government structures. And what have we got? A virtual collapse of the social system creating an almost impossible security situation. The police can't be relied on. We have had to send in the army to try and restore some kind of order and the Eastern Cape generally is in trouble. Now the sixth man, whom I haven't mentioned, is in Ciskei, that is Magkoba ... Sandile, he is in Ciskei. Transkei is five and then one in Ciskei, a major Paramount Chief. So the dilemma you are faced with between ancient and modern, between traditional rule and modern democratic rule is a dilemma which we haven't solved and in the meantime the issue becomes a police matter. You just get this breakdown. The Chiefs don't know where they are. They have no idea what's happening. The democratic structures have not yet been set up really, taken hold and so it means that we made a big mistake here which incidentally the British didn't make when they pulled out of Africa. They made sure they negotiated not only in respect of the modern sector but they also negotiated what was going to happen in the rural areas with the traditional rules and in every constitutional conference sponsored by the British the traditional rules were represented so you got an overall holistic negotiation. We rejected that in South Africa. The IFP tried to put it forward. It was rejected by CODESA. They said that will be dealt with later, the issue of traditional areas and the traditional rulers will be dealt with when local government was set up. Well, we have got problems with regard to that and it's a great pity because it means that takes up vast resources, police resources, in areas which normally were not - I mean you had a handful of police running huge traditional areas because they were backed up by the traditional system, the traditional legal and administrative system.
POM. So what's the answer, so to speak, when you come to balancing the traditional structures as against modern democratic structures? How do you integrate the two? Do you end up with some kind of a hybrid?
JM. Well Botswana have done it in a rather interesting way. The Botswana solution was to have elected District Councils in the eight tribal areas. You had a District Council which is elected and then you continue to have the Chief and his traditional structure and they then divided up the powers and said on some powers the powers are concurrent and some powers belong to the tribal authority, some powers belong to the District Council. So there was a careful division of powers and a kind of sharing of responsibilities and control and it works. But maybe it worked there because the structure itself is created by the Chiefs because in Botswana the democracy there was created by the Chiefs. You see in Botswana the Paramount Chief of the major tribe was Seretse Khama and he himself was leading the fight for democracy in Botswana. So they were very fortunate that you didn't get a competition between a conservative traditional leadership versus the modern democratic party kind of organisation. There the traditionalists created the democracy and it's interesting that it's the only democracy in Africa which is fully functioning. And one wonders.
POM. If you applied this to the situation of the IFP and look at the last local election vote where the overwhelming preponderance of the urban vote went to the ANC and the overwhelming preponderance of the rural vote went to the IFP, you are now becoming a party that's associated with rural traditionalism rather than urban democracy, so to speak. And many commentators have said unless you break out of the mould of being seen as representatives of traditional rural society, that as a national party you just won't cut it.
JM. But if you look at democracy in other parts of the world can one say that democracy in Britain was essentially urban led? I wonder if the squires in the countryside and the landed gentry, what role did they play in the creation of the modern British democracy? Your urban working class contribution to democracy comes late, comes fairly late in the development. Therefore one has to be careful not to create a dichotomy that urban equals democratic and rural equals traditionalist and undemocratic. That's not an historically accurate development at all. That's a journalistic, not an historical, situation that is described there. You take the famous schools in South Africa, Lovedale which was the most famous of the schools established by the missionaries. That was established on land provided by Chief Makoma(?) who welcomed the missionaries, welcomed education, so your major educational institutions you find were created before there were cities in this country. Now therefore your educated class came from the rural areas. Hence you get a situation in which rural leaders, rural educated leaders brought modern ideas to the cities. So who is the leader of the ANC? It's Mandela but where does he come from? The Mandelas, the Sisulus, the Mbekis and others, where do they come from? They are not urban at all. They are rural. So one has to watch out and not get a stereotype sort of situation where one assumes that an urban or modern outlook necessarily comes from people who have grown up in an urban environment. It's not necessarily so.
POM. But what have the elections, since politics is about perceptions, the perception that is being created is that the IFP is increasingly the party of defending traditional structures, speaking on behalf of rural people particularly in KwaZulu/Natal and that it has become more, since 1994, more of a rural party than a national urban party?
JM. Even that word is difficult. Ten thousand members of the Democratic Party you describe as national and two million members of the IFP you describe as regional. I would rather have the two million, thank you very much, than the ten thousand so-called national members scattered all over South Africa. I would rather have two million Zulus sending me to parliament and making me a deputy minister. So the majority of people in this country live in the rural areas, not in the urban areas. If you are being a pragmatic politician what would you do? Would you say, well the chances of being voted into parliament are better if my address is Soweto than if my address is Nongoma? Well a politician will say, no wait a minute, I have a better chance of being elected if I stand at Nongoma than if I stand at Soweto. So what do you do then? The politician always goes where he has a potential constituency. He doesn't say to himself, I want to be looked upon as modern and therefore I must represent people in an urban area. He won't do that. So I think that it's a question of how does democracy represent people in a particular country. Who needs development most in South Africa? It's the rural people. Who are the poorest of the poor? It's the rural people. Who is going to represent them? If we follow some of the philosophies that are being advocated nobody will represent them, and we choose to represent them.
POM. In this connection what would the party's reaction be to the government's macro-economic document which is very highly private sector oriented, very much puts the emphasis on business as the agent of change which often again means that poorer people and poorer people in rural areas get left by the wayside?
JM. In the first place in practical terms your free enterprise party is the IFP, it's not the ANC. The ANC has a more socialist tradition and culture and I would dare you to find a businessman who is frightened of the IFP's free enterprise approach to the economy. They are not frightened of that as far as the IFP is concerned. They know that if you had the IFP in power, free enterprise would be free to proceed. But what we are contesting is the idea that you can get development in a country by concentrating it in a modern enclave surrounded by subsistence and poverty. We think that's an uneven development of the economy and that is precisely what we had under the previous government, that they were saying develop the metropolitan areas and hope for the best with regard to the countryside. Well we reject that. We think there must be a development plan which incorporates the rural areas and in particular the neglected rural areas, not the commercial farms which are obviously very well padded and very well looked after by the previous government. But we are talking of the bulk of the people in the so-called homelands and so on. Those people suffered really under the previous dispensation. 20% of the people in South Africa, maybe it's a little more now, have electricity, so where is the 80%? Telephones, there are no telephones in the rural areas. Your infrastructure. So development in order to create an even development in South Africa which is an essential part of economic development, has to cater for the interests of the rural people. You can't ignore that. And I think that the economic development in East Asia didn't ignore the rural areas at all. They brought them into play, whether it's Taiwan or even China for that matter. They didn't do that.
POM. So how do you see the future of the IFP post-1994 elections? I would gather from remarks that Chief Buthelezi made after the elections that he was disappointed and angry with the results and there was all kinds of finger pointing going on within the organisation as to who was to blame for the virtual collapse of the party in areas like Maritzburg, Durban, Richards Bay. The party was going to go through a self-analysis. Has it done that?
JM. This is all journalism. The ANC increased its vote from 32% to 33%. Really, is this really a devastating increase in support from 32% to 33%, a 1% increase in their support in the urban areas? Well, I would say this, that some of the remarks that were made even by Minister Buthelezi were made before there was an analysis of the vote at all. You see because there were champagne parties in the ANC, we have won the urban areas, people didn't realise that they hadn't moved an inch and Kaiser Nyatsumba(?) of The Star in an article a few weeks ago pointed this out, that this shout of triumph in fact when the voting was analysed it turns out that it wasn't a triumph at all. I think myself that what we have to bear in mind is the majority of the people in South Africa still live in the rural areas and we are talking about people you see. Democracy distorts power relations by basing them on each individual vote. That means you have to go for the votes and not where the power lies. Now President Mandela said after the elections in KwaZulu/Natal, "We are very happy because we have captured the economic heartlands of South Africa." And he forgot that that's not how the system works. The guy in the heartland has one vote and the chap in the rural area has one vote - each. So the fellow who is going to get the support of the rural areas can upset your plans for a very, very long time. In other words you have a kind of Gaullist situation where the countryside just never was able to support the left and the left has always had that difficulty, that the rural heartlands of France continued to stick to a conservative policy.
POM. How, which is beginning already, in the run-up to the 1999 elections, how do you see the IFP positioning itself?
JM. I think we are going to begin to see a realignment based on class in South Africa. Up to now we haven't had a class economic-based reality, it has been ethnic. You are going to get a movement away from that into the rural poor, the urban affluent, including the labour aristocracy represented by COSATU which is 9% or 10% of the economically active part of the population. They will go in the ANC direction and then the rural poor will move in the direction of the IFP. Hence, the astonishing welcome given to Chief Buthelezi at the Bisho Legislature, at the House of Chiefs, because we are now getting an unprecedented situation where the traditional leaders in the rural areas can come together at a conference in Durban with the IFP traditionalists, so that the ANC will have to wake up if they want to preserve the big votes they got in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape and the Northern Province in particular. I think we are challenging them in the rural areas because they marginalised the rural areas in actual practice, though in words they speak about representing everybody.
POM. So you would see the appeal of the party as being to people in rural areas outside of KwaZulu/Natal, as you become more identified with being the party that represents the interests of rural people and that the interests of rural people are very definitely different than the interests of urban people?
JM. Well they are not different, we mustn't be impossible about it, that's why I mentioned Mandela who comes from Qunu in Transkei and he is the leader of an urban party. That still doesn't alter the fact that he comes from Qunu, Mbeki comes from Butterworth in Transkei, Sisulu comes from the Kaleka area and so on. These are all people from rural areas because of our peculiar migratory system where there has been a movement of people back and forth between urban and rural. I mean most of the people working on the mines are rural and yet they support an industry which produces the wealth which produces Johannesburg. So one must be careful not to carry the terms rural and urban too far. But I say that we are talking of class. There is a class which has benefited tremendously from the democratic changes that have taken place, the professionals, the people who have gone into government, the people who have gone into parliament, the people who are engaged in big deals like the Johnnic deal and so on. These are all urban developments and in the rural areas the people have really not yet benefited from the changes that have taken place and they are very disillusioned and are waiting for people who can tell them how to get out of their predicament.
POM. You talked about realignment, some people either wishfully or use an analysis to say that it is inevitable that there will be a realignment within the ANC itself, that just as strains on the alliance are becoming too much and eventually must boil over, maybe not before 1999 but some time thereafter, then there are those who say, well when you exercise power, and they talk about what a broad cathedral the ANC is, that you can accommodate many quite different elements within that because it's the glue of power that holds you all together and it is better to have your disagreements and have power than to have your disagreements result in your not having power. Then there are those who would say that if the IFP is to break out of the position that it is in that it must direct its appeal more to African voters rather than to white urban voters, that it must become a more African party because that's where the votes are. There are those who say that the National Party's wish, they're being charitable when they say 'wish', belief that it can somehow transform itself into a viable multi-racial party is ignoring the legacy of history, that the oppressed just don't turn around and suddenly embrace the oppressor as the role model of the kind of political party they want to represent them. Just with those ideas, what do you see?
JM. Well let's deal with the last one. The Republican Party in the United States freed the slaves but eventually the blacks became a solid support for the Democratic Party who were the slave party. Now that happened because the Democratic Party transformed itself and because it was the party in the north and it had developed links with the trade unions and so on and gradually they occupied a class position which made them a logical home for the black people in the United States and the Republican Party is now regarded and has been regarded for a very long time as the party that is against the interests of the oppressed black people. But they were the fellows who actually fought a civil war in order to bring about the emancipation of the slaves. Therefore, one must bear in mind that human beings basically are selfish. They are interested in their survival, they are interested in what is in their interests. Now that really is the way I deal - if the National Party can succeed to show that it is more in line with what people want and not just confine that to the coloured people as at present of course it will gradually win more and more support because the legacy of history works for and against all of us. The legacy of history is something that hampers or assists every single party.
POM. In this regard would it have to become a black party?
JM. Not necessarily. I don't think necessarily because it's a matter of arithmetic. If the National Party got the bulk of the white vote, got the bulk of the coloured vote, got a reasonable support among blacks, it would be a formidable force without changing its basic character as a white led party. It's a question of class interests which, as I say, are going to begin to tell because up to now you couldn't have a normal party development in South Africa. Everything was determined by race, by ethnicity and race. Now you remove that factor then you are going to get people beginning to think of their basic interests. I am sure that there is more in common between Michael Spicer of Anglo American and Cyril Ramaphosa than Cyril Ramaphosa and Beki Twele in KwaZulu/Natal. The two have nothing in common though they are both black. So class interests are also a factor which we have to take into account.
. Now with regard to the ANC/COSATU/South African Communist Party alliance, I think one should bear in mind that it's not the Labour Party kind of situation where the workers formed the Labour Party and financed it. This is not the case here. Here it's the ANC which encouraged the establishment of trade unions and the establishment of a federation of trade unions. Historically they assisted workers, not the other way around where workers assisted the ANC. But a lot of white people thinking of Britain, keep on talking as if COSATU bears the same relation to the ANC as the Labour Party to the trade unions and it's totally different, the two have nothing in common. Therefore the ANC can shed COSATU without any problem at all, it is not dependent on the trade union movement at all because the trade union movement cuts across parties. There are many different parties represented in COSATU. Once it gets down to voting for candidates and so on COSATU won't be able to maintain itself as a block of votes so I don't think that that possibility really is one that is going to cause sleepless nights for the ANC. Similarly with the Communist Party I don't think the ANC would be afraid that the Communist Party would walk away with a large part of their support. I doubt if that would be the case. It's the Communist Party which has got to worry that if they are not linked with the ANC their chances of getting members into parliament will be very small.
POM. So as a party what's the prevailing view of the direction in which the party must go to increase its share of the vote to become more of a national party?
JM. You see you keep on saying 'national' party, in what sense?
POM. In terms of its representation in the national parliament.
JM. We've got 43 members. The Democratic Party has seven, seven, and you describe them as a national party?
POM. No I haven't described them as anything, I've never mentioned them.
JM. This is the point. I feel that if I were a strategist I will be saying to myself, 27% of the electorate are in KwaZulu/Natal, 27%. 50% are in KwaZulu/Natal, Mpumalanga and Gauteng, over half the electorate is in those three provinces, each of those provinces having very close links with KwaZulu/Natal and there are lots of Zulus around in those provinces. And I would say to myself, why should I bother about Western Cape, the coloureds and other? Why must I bother about them? Let me put all my resources into the area which has got over 50% of the electorate and where I have a potential constituency. In other words the thing will be based on a careful calculation of potential support. Then I would say to myself now, rightly or wrongly we are perceived as a rural party so I will try and see if I can penetrate into any of the rural areas like Transkei and Ciskei and North West and so on and then if somebody says to me let's work hard in Soweto or let's put some money into Kimberly or Port Elizabeth or East London I would say forget it, not interested, not interested.
. So that I think myself that one must not be misled by the analysis made by journalists who tend to consider reality to conform to the stories that they write and not to the actual realities. They got the shock of their lives when the IFP got 43 members of parliament because they said the IFP is a marginal party with a few supporters around Ulundi, they will get about 3% of the vote. They were wrong so why not admit it and say look we were wrong instead of carrying on with illusions about the IFP will disappear and something will happen and so on. It won't disappear, it's not going to disappear. In fact it's going to grow and already the Human Sciences Research Council survey shows that there has been an increase in the support for the IFP and it's the only one that's growing. The ANC has lost support and the NP. Now everybody is shocked. Even Chief Buthelezi when he saw this said to me, "The survey must be wrong." And I said, "No, no, no." Even he didn't believe that there could be any sort of credibility in this survey which was recently done. Of course I think it's the question that was asked which put the IFP in a more favourable light after the Constitutional Court decision who was proved right, and of course people will say the IFP was proved right in regard to the provincial powers and so on. So I don't think it really was a fair survey which was asking the right questions, whom would you vote for, to which maybe you would have a different answer.
POM. If the elections were held today would you expect the IFP to increase its share of the vote or for the ANC to increase its share of the vote or for the NP to increase its share of the vote?
JM. I think the parties which would be able to attack the ANC for non-delivery will increase their share of the vote. The ANC is going to have a very big difficulty of not being able to demonstrate that it delivered on the promises that were made in the last election so there will be a protest vote but I don't think it will lose its majority. I don't think they will lose their majority. They will maintain a majority but the 62% they got they won't get next time. I don't think so.
POM. Why do you think it is that despite all the plans, first of all it was the RDP then that disappeared off the map, and now it's the macro-economic plan which already one can see that reality makes the achievement of the goal that it has set itself virtually impossible. You're not going to get a 6% growth rate next year. The best projections are for a growth rate of under 3%. You're not going to get the kind of job creation it envisages. It's predicated on the assumption that if they do all the right things and the big boys in the international community say that's a nice plan, that somehow that's going to translate into private investment or foreign investment coming into the country and that is not going to happen either. In terms of planning, again, (i) where would the IFP differ from where it would put the emphasis, and (ii) what is the problem of delivery? Could any other party do any better, any other new party coming into power unacquainted with the levers of government and in this constant restructuring and transition period? Are these just not problems that are systemic?
JM. No I think the problem is one which the Labour Party usually faces in Britain. How do socialists manage a capitalist economy? Will the capitalists have confidence that socialists can manage the economy better? It's always a dilemma for government interventionist parties. There is a love/hate relationship between such parties and the people who can do the job, namely the free enterprise and the private enterprise. The IFP would be for free enterprise, they would say we are not interested in running businesses, that the state should try and run an enterprise or a business. We might restrict privatisation when it comes to certain utilities like water or electricity but for the rest why must we be running all these businesses, the airways and whatnot? Why should that be run by state bureaucracies? The state sector in South Africa, 50% of fixed capital assets are owned by the state. This is ridiculous. How can you have a free enterprise economy in which 50% of fixed capital assets are held by the state? You've got to get rid of this waste, all the waste, the unnecessary assets that are in the hands of the state which are all right in a totally undeveloped economy but South Africa has reached the critical point where it has to take off. It's not an undeveloped economy, it's one of the 25, 30 market related industrialised countries so it needs now to take off but it's got a government which is inhibited, which is scared of conglomerates, which is scared of Anglo American and others and so on because they want still to be seen as the party of the workers and so on.
. Well you see you just can't. You do not take the right decisions. In other words you do the right thing in paragraph one and you cancel it in paragraph ten. You read that macro-economic plan and you see if you read it like a lawyer, you see a lawyer if you read a contract drawn up by a lawyer you've got to be very careful that the advantage that you get in the first paragraphs has not been taken away in subsequent paragraphs. Now these plans are like that. They are not consistent. They are trying to please everybody so they will say a good thing here on something, state fiscal restraint and use that expression which pleases the business people, and then they will do something else which increases government expenditure. So it is this kind of ambivalence which is creating the lack of confidence.
. Then this question of confidence which is such a subtle thing. Confidence. You remove Liebenberg, a banker, and you put Trevor Manuel. Now the man may be earnest, sincere, but is there confidence? It's something you can't measure. I bet you if you put Liebenberg back in the Ministry of Finance the rand would start shooting up. Why? Not because of anything he had done but simply that one of them has come back to the Ministry of Finance, a big banker, and therefore they will say he understands the system, he is going to take the right decisions. And this issue of confidence is one that our people still under-estimate. They should have put in Alec Erwin as Minister of Finance because he had already won himself a position of confidence despite the fact that he is a communist, but business people had confidence that Alec Erwin seems to know what needs to be done and he was doing very well. Then you shift him, take him to Trade & Industry, take Trevor where he was doing quite well and bring him into Finance, a tricky thing like this and then you've got problems.
POM. Two last questions. I left at the end of May and then came back about the middle of August and just in that period of time I noticed a couple of changes. One was that white people as a whole had become far more sceptical about the future. There was just less optimism there, there was a down mood, that the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, it was like Pandora's Box had been opened and things are popping out that people have lost control over where it's going and how it is to be managed with all kinds of unpredictable consequences for the country, and third that there has been, if anything, a level of racial polarisation rather than integration, that whites are retreating back into their enclaves, the NP is becoming a more white party again and the ANC is more of an African party than ever before and that that seems to be the trend.
JM. Yes, I think that the optimism that we had shortly after the elections and perhaps the earlier part of 1995 has been somewhat, well I won't say completely dissipated, that would be going too far, but the optimism has certainly waned partly because of the ham-handed way certain decisions were handled, the way the Boesak affair was handled, the way the dismissal of Winnie Mandela was handled, the impression of bungling which we have had. The Malan trial, a whole host of little things which are not the fundamental things but a lot of little things have, I think, conspired to create this more pessimistic atmosphere, and then of course the crime wave. There is nothing you can do really to induce optimism if there is this fear and apprehension on a very important aspect of life, personal security. You see personal security, the fact that you can get into your car, drive to work and drive back, that kind of personal security is vital for an economy. You can't run an economy if people are going to be faced with arbitrary shootings in the taxi rank, you are going to work or you are coming back from work, you get into a taxi and firing starts and that kind of thing has a devastating effect on people and I think their failure to really get a handle on the security situation, crime situation, not in the big sense. You see you can break up a big syndicate and arrest all the people, that doesn't have the impact because the syndicate that is engaged in money laundering doesn't affect the personal security of people, but mugging affects a chap. The car hijacking affects a person and the fact that there are so many personal stories in which people have experienced crime first hand has created, I think, a lot of the pessimism that you see today.
POM. And the Truth Commission?
JM. Well the Truth Commission, some of us of course predicted that this is what would happen and opposed the Act and people said the IFP is being perverse and so on. Now of course we have the ridiculous situation in which the chairman of the commission is ready to resign. But we met him with Minister Buthelezi. I met with them, two of us, with Boraine and Archbishop Tutu and we told them what we thought would happen, that they handling this thing the wrong way. You see what happened in Chile was very different. They keep on saying they are following the model of Chile but in Chile the commission was an historical commission. It dealt with what happened and you ended up still with Pinochet being the head of the army. So that was different. We said if you are handling it that way, what happened in the past, but if you start with this individual finger-pointing and so on and all that in a commission where there is no cross-examination of those who come before it and so on, it's not like a trial, where names are thrown about, then the thing becomes a blackmailers paradise, allegations are thrown this way and that way, gruesome events are brought up without any indication of what it all meant and then you get the impression of a one-sided approach which is what has happened, that the ANC people are not being brought to book. Then of course the thing doesn't work and this is what has caused the crisis of the TRC.
POM. Do you think it's creating among whites a kind of a backlash, that they're getting angry that their top leaders are being drawn into it, they are being told they must show remorse and feel guilt and that they have committed a crime against humanity and they must acknowledge it and they are removed from it? They don't buy it, they don't buy that they did something evil.
JM. The analogy with what happened after the defeat of Germany is quite wrong. In the first place the sheer scale of the world war and of the casualties and everything that happened there is very different and you can't say the South African situation is analogous in any sort of way. That's the first point. Secondly, the Germans were defeated. The state was defeated, militarily defeated, and the victors organised the Nuremberg trial and nobody was trying to create a nation between the defeated and the victorious. Here you are trying to build a new nation based on certain principles and you think you can build it by raking up the evils of the past. Well you see it may not psychologically work like that. Instead you may be humiliating people who feel they were not defeated. You didn't defeat them in war and now you come up and behave as if you are the victors and not partners in a negotiated settlement and this is what is causing the bitterness. It's not that the people don't acknowledge that terrible things were done in the name of the state. They are very ashamed of those things but their feeling is that, well look at what the other people did.
. Take the IFP for instance, now the IFP was not involved in this war at all but they were then attacked on the basis that they were working in the system, not because they had done anything. There was an ideological decision taken that those people who are participating in these legislatures and in these governments are traitors so they were being attacked and they decided we are not going to take these attacks, we are going to defend ourselves, and that's how the civil war in KwaZulu/Natal began. Now the ANC is never prepared to acknowledge that they fired the first shots, that they drew first blood. If you don't get that kind of acknowledgement people are going to say the thing is a farce, and that's what's happening.
POM. OK, I will leave it there. Thank you ever so much.