By Norm Dixon
JOHANNESBURG — The terrible prospect of a blood-soaked election campaign in the Natal/KwaZulu region may have receded a little following a meeting in Durban between African National Congress president Nelson Mandela and Inkatha leader Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.
After eight hours of talks on March 1, Buthelezi and Mandela announced that the Inkatha Freedom Party would consider registering "provisionally" to participate in the April elections. The announcement caught Inkatha's partners in the right-wing Freedom Alliance by surprise, sending them into a flurry of activity to decide whether they would register.
Mandela and Buthelezi agreed to explore "the possibility of international mediation" to resolve outstanding constitutional differences. Both leaders also said they would "work together to ensure that canvassing for respective views should take place without let or hindrance" and that the escalating levels of violence were "unacceptable and were jeopardising the conditions for socioeconomic reconstruction".
However, few here think that political violence, especially in Natal and parts of the PWV, is about to subside to any real extent. Buthelezi's clear motive in agreeing to consider registration while not committing Inkatha to participation in the elections is to allow him to apply further pressure for more concessions that will entrench his hold on power in the new KwaZulu/Natal province.
Every opinion poll shows that Inkatha cannot win a majority in KwaZulu/Natal in April. Inkatha's only bargaining chip is its ability to disrupt the election through violence.
The ANC has gone a long way to address the concerns voiced by the Freedom Alliance. The right has insisted that the provinces be given exclusive power over a wide range of policy areas. The FA has also insisted that the national assembly be unable to alter these powers when it writes the final constitution to replace the interim constitution that will govern South Africa for the next five years.
On February 23, the multiparty negotiating council met in Johannesburg's World Trade Centre and agreed that the powers of the provinces would not be "substantially diminished" and that the provinces would take primary responsibility for 29 out of the 34 policy areas that the right wing had demanded.
The national assembly could still override provincial legislation to ensure: national coordination and uniformity of "basic norms and standards"; necessary standards for rendering public service; maintenance of economic unity, protection of the environment, promotion of interprovincial commerce, protection of the common market or the maintenance of national security; or that provincial laws not prejudice the economic health or security of another province or the country as a whole, or impede the implementation of national economic policies. These changes were passed in a special three-day session of parliament beginning on February 28.
The day before the meeting with Mandela, Inkatha floated the idea that the election in KwaZulu/Natal be delayed for a year. During that time a provincial constitution would be drafted and put to a referendum.
That same day, at the opening of the ANC's media centre, Mandela told the assembled media there were "two points on which we would like to be very clear that we can make no concession whatsoever. And that is the postponement of the date of the election, and secondly South Africa [must] remain a united country. We cannot accept and cannot compromise on demands which amount to secession." Buthelezi did not raise postponement of the election in his meeting with Mandela.
In a speech to Inkatha MPs on the day after the meeting, Buthelezi made it plain that he had not moved very far. He said that "the position remains exactly the same as before".
While Mandela and Buthelezi were meeting in Durban, in Cape Town ANC secretary general Cyril Ramaphosa told the Transitional Executive Council that the situation in Natal was deteriorating by the day. Inkatha training camps were "churning out" thousands of people to be deployed to prevent the April elections taking place in the region.
Ramaphosa said right-wing white farmers were training and arming Inkatha supporters. He read a letter from a Natal chief who threatened any Zulu who voted in the KwaZulu/Natal region with death.
Meanwhile, the government of the Bophuthatswana bantustan, another member of the Freedom Alliance, may not survive until the election. The dictatorship of Lucas Mangope opposes the April election and refuses to allow the apartheid-sanctioned "independent" homeland to be reincorporated into South Africa.
Strikes have spread throughout the homeland's work force for several weeks. Nurses, teachers, public servants and bus drivers have demanded that the government pay back their pension contributions before the election, increase their wages by 50% and improve working conditions. Police attacked striking health workers on February 21 with tear gas and rubber bullets.
On March 1, Bophuthatswana public servants and shopkeepers began a week-long general strike to demand that South Africa's labour laws cover workers in the homeland. The ANC and the Congress of South African Trade Unions have voted to launch a campaign of mass action against the Mangope regime beginning on March 7 if it does not allow free political activity and agree to allow the April election to take place in the territory.