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South Africa: Throwing a Chair is Sign of Progress
Real estate news By Cyril Madlala
29 October 2007
WHEN police were called in to restore order as chairs and insults flew in Vryheid last week, it captured perfectly how far the politics of KwaZulu-Natal has moved since the bloody turf wars of the late '90s between the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the African National Congress (ANC). The provincial legislature was being "taken to the people". The idea had been to showcase our new democracy to a black community in an area where, officially, apartheid might have died, but the stench of the corpse is there for all to inhale. Black locals complained to the visiting members of the legislature about a shop with separate entrances for blacks and whites. Those who work on the farms say conditions are as harsh as ever, brutality part of their daily lives.
The very first day, proceedings degenerated into such chaos between the ANC and the IFP that law enforcement officers had to intervene. At the heart of the chaos was an important point for debate: would the province be better off under ANC or IFP rule? In the early years of democracy, everybody agreed that the IFP and the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal needed to go to extraordinary lengths to nurture an extremely fragile co-operation for the sake of peace.
While the rest of the country had a relatively smooth transition to freedom, this part of the world threatened to erupt into mayhem. Those conditions imposed on leaders on both sides a responsibility to be "soft" on each other publicly. That is history. The ANC is now in charge of the government and the IFP has positioned itself firmly as an opposition party as it tries to recapture a political territory that many consider to be its last hope for survival and a launch pad for possible future growth.
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