Although you're national chairman of theInkatha Freedom Party and the party's leader in KwaZulu-Natal, youoften sound as if you could be in the Democratic Party. Would you callyourself a liberal?
Yes, indeed. I come from that tradition. I went to a mission school,attended the University of Natal and was a keen member of Nusas, whichwas a magnificent liberal organisation. I've always been a strongCatholic and I would regard Archbishop Denis Hurley as the outstandingchurch leader of my time - brave, compassionate, unswervingly humaneand liberal even under the greatest pressure. He never played to thegallery; a man of pure principle.

Did those such views mean you feltout of place when you were a minister in the nationalgovernment?
No, not really. Most of government is trying to work out pragmaticallywhat exactly you're going to do and then working equally pragmaticallyto implement it. To be sure, when Mrs Madikizela-Mandela was my juniorminister we had differences of opinion and lifestyle, but even so we'dsit down and work things out. Being premier of KwaZulu-Natal is a fartougher and more wide-ranging job but actually the same applies. Whenyou get down to it, government is - or ought to be - about delivery,about drawing up business plans and budgets. Party differences seldomgive us any real difficulty.

Currently there's some talk ofactually abolishing provincial government and yet at the same time manyof the premiers want more power devolved to the provinces.
I'm very much one of the latter. But when we meet in the premiers'forum we all have similar concerns. It's more obvious all the time thatthe IFP was and is right to be federalist. It's particularly importantthat the provinces be given policing powers and we must also be allowedtaxation powers. But our autonomy could be cut. Many ministers in thecentral government are way too interventionist: far too much ofeducation is still nationally controlled, for example. Those ministerswould like to cut our autonomy. But this will only happen if MECs don'tdo their jobs properly. At the moment I'd say it was a toss-up whichway it will go.

Walter Felgate, interviewed in theJanuary issue of Focus argued that the real crunch came at a lowerlevel and that the IFP has an insuperable problem in the clash betweenpreserving the powers of the traditional chieftaincy and the principleof elective democracy in local government.
Don't take Walter Felgate too seriously. He was always an impossiblydifficult man to work with and I think he's really someone who can onlysee his own self-interest. It would be understandable that Waltershould now be so embittered with the IFP if we had deliberatelymarginalised him, but it wasn't so. He ceased to play any role in theparty simply because he was so ill. He now behaves as if that wassomehow our fault, but his bitterness is contained withinhimself.

As for the chieftaincy, there Felgate is trying not to admit what heknows. He's worked in Maputaland, he's lived in old traditionalZululand, he knows how the chieftaincy works. You can't expect theelders in those areas to accept some young man elected just because aparty put his name on a ticket. It doesn't work like that. The elders -and that means the community at large - are very slow to accept anyone.They want to know who you are, where you come from, who your family wasand if they were respectable people. In those areas everything is stilldone with the chief - not just the allocation of land but settlingdisputes, getting married, everything. It's a way of life and theminister, Mohamed Valli Moosa, has been very foolish by trying toimpose one man, one vote democracy there. He's paying no attention tothe anthropology and sociology of the situation. Democracy in thecountryside means respecting its lore, usage and custom, not floutingit. You have to be more gradualist.

We now have a situation where most ofthe Nguni traditional leaders right down the eastern seaboard areopposed to the ANC government. The Zulu ones always have been and nowthe chiefs in the Eastern Cape seem to be up in arms too.
It's very worrying. But I think Thabo Mbeki is sensitive to theproblem. There is a real danger of the gulf between the chiefs and thegovernment opening into one of total defiance. That has to be headedoff. The White Paper on local government has to be reversed. Itsrecommendations for the countryside will be just as disastrous as itsmegacity plans for the urban areas. Again, it makes us feel that theIFP was right about all this in the constitutional negotiations. Wesaid this situation could be avoided by asymmetrical federalism, thatis by giving some provinces different powers from others, and you can'tkeep governing against the social structure. It's the same thing asignoring the role of age in African society or of trying to carry outreform of the hostels without taking account of the extended familystructure.

The original sin here was the ANC's refusal to make room fortraditional African society within the liberation struggle. Inkathacontributed a great deal to that struggle but our role was denied anddenigrated. Now that same sort of liberation struggle thinking istrying to ignore the social realities of African life. It won't workand it is deeply debilitating for our social structure. As it is, oursocial fabric is in tatters - look at the crime, the rape, the childabuse. We need to work with the grain, not increase the stress byworking against it.

You feel government policy is workingin the wrong direction?
Yes, in many areas it clearly is. I'm hoping Mbeki will really pullthe country out of the mess it's in. The situation in higher educationis particularly worrying: we can't allow the destruction of our centresof excellence in the name of transformation. And our labour legislationis a complete disaster. Of course it's important to protect those inwork but there's no point in legislating in a way which actuallydestroys jobs. The problem here is a belief that you can simply makethings the way you want by passing a law. You can't. Even America hasnot been able to prevent its blue-collar workers from having their realincomes cut. It has to happen because America's comparative advantagedoes not lie in its unskilled labour and such labour is cheaperelsewhere in the world. If America can't resist the logic of themarket, then we certainly can't.

What we actually need is training, training and more training. Notjust excellence in higher education but perhaps even more important,training for artisans, plumbers, mechanics and other intermediateskills. That's where we should be putting our effort, not in playingCanute with our labour laws.

Don't these differences make it hardto see the IFP getting together with the ANC? What are the prospectsfor a merger or a joint list in 1999?
There will be no merger and no joint list. The differences between usare too great, especially at grassroots level, and these differenceshave not really been addressed. I'm expecting a re-run of the 1994election except I am hopeful that the IFP will do better inKwaZulu-Natal than last time. But the IFP-ANC talks are important: wemust work together to lower tension and increase tolerance. This isessential not only for the sake of peace but in order to achieve thedelivery of services and development at local level. But our relationswill be badly damaged if the ANC tries to use Walter Felgate as abattering ram against us. Anyone is free to change party, of course.But our politics are so brazen and deadly. Felgate had an extremelyprivileged position within the IFP and to exploit that to try to hurtus will be to sabotage our attempt at better relations and thus ourhopes of peace.

In our other publication, Briefing(February 1998) we related how you had prevented a provincial assemblydebate on the question of the apparent involvement of high levelpoliticians in the bank heists in KwaZulu-Natal. You said you did thisto save money but there were many within your own caucus who thoughtthis was going too far in sacrificing everything to the cause of betterrelations with the ANC.
I read that in Briefing. But the reason for postponing the debatereally was financial. To reconvene the legislature for a specialsession would have been expensive. At the same time I was locked incrucial discussions in the national budget forum and in desperatenegotiations with our bankers over the province's overdraft. If at thatpoint I'd lashed out extra expenditure, no matter how slight, not topass urgent legislation but simply to have a rancorous and probablyinconclusive debate, the people I was dealing with would have thrown uptheir hands and said we weren't serious. But the legislature willreconvene soon and then the debate must take place. (Editor's note: Itwas held on March 19.) The questions raised about political involvementin the bank heists are extremely serious. There are doubtless many darksecrets there, which ought to come out. But not only about thatmatter.

How do you mean?
Look, we still haven't got to the bottom of the assassinationcampaign, which murdered some 400 IFP leaders. The TRC has obstinatelyrefused to look into this, it's a disgrace. Without any doubt at all MKhit squads were roaming the province, running guns in from outside, andwere conducting a large-scale strategy of targeted murders. The peoplewho carried all that out are probably sitting in high positions today.Moreover, this was going on while the de Klerk government was in power.They knew what was happening and they covered it all up. The NationalParty and the ANC were in an effective partnership from 1990 on and oneof the terms of the deal seems to have been that this murder campaigncould be waged without hindrance. There may be even more dark secretsabout that than there are in the bank heists affair.

How do you assess the politicalsituation four years on from April 1994?
If I were in the ANC I think I would be somewhat panicky. They'reclosing ranks and not admitting it but actually none of them would everhave predicted then that four years later the Reconstruction andDevelopment Programme would have failed, that the Masakhane campaign toget people to pay their rates would have failed, that unemploymentwould have risen, that so few houses would have been built and thatthere would be a textbooks crisis in the schools. The country as awhole simply hasn't got its act together and all of us who are in powermust take some blame for that.

The IFP had 20 years in government before 1994 and we had a shrewdidea what was coming. Dr Buthelezi always made it clear that thegovernment couldn't hope to do everything and all at once but the ANCwere in no mood to listen. I don't think they even noticed the size ofthe national debt until after they got in. For our part, we decided wewould support the RDP, the special presidential initiatives on healthcare for children and so on but we had few illusions. We desperatelywant the country to succeed but this is going to mean admitting to whathas happened and changing policy in a number of areas.

Are you the next IFPleader?
In Zulu culture that's a deadly question. Dr Buthelezi is stillextremely healthy and fit and he has many years of active politics leftin him. Speculation about the succession is simply foolish. I have myhands more than full as premier and party leader here. The IFP made abit of a mess of the local elections in KwaZulu-Natal and I am deeplyconscious of my responsibility to deliver a resounding IFP victorythere in 1999.