Buthelezi: SA needs a shared dream
2012-01-08 22:37
Johannesburg - IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi on Sunday called on South Africans to adopt a shared dream for the country.
If South Africans were not able to see each other as South Africans first they had moved backwards since the ANC's founding in Bloemfontein in 1912, he said.
"Are those outside the ANC able to put our love of [the] country before whatever differences we may have with the ANC? And can the ANC accept that South Africanism means more than holding an ANC membership card?," he asked.
Buthelezi pointed out that he had formed the Inkatha Freedom Party with the approval of Oliver Tambo, who headed the ANC in exile, in order to provide a vehicle for political mobilisation and keep the ANC banner flying under a different connotation.
This accounted for the IFP adopting ANC's colours, songs and slogans.
"It felt natural to me, for I had grown up in the ANC," Buthelezi said.
But said Buthelezid his relationship with the ANC changed in 1979.
He could not agree to join the ANC's armed struggle and allow the IFP's structures to be used for that purpose.
He also could not endorse the ANC's call for sanctions and foreign disinvestment.
"While not affecting the white population, sanctions and disinvestment destroyed millions of job opportunities for black people which, twenty years later, we have not been able to regain," Buthelezi said.
Foreign investors who left in the 1980s had not returned to the country.
This he said, had compounded South Africa's difficult task of generating economic growth and unemployment.
- SAPA