Des Erasmus
KwaZulu-Natal’s IFP Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs MEC, Thulasizwe Buthelezi, has called for a monument to deceased Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi in eThekwini, saying the city’s giant statues of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo leave South Africa’s liberation story “incomplete”.
“Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi was the bridge between the ANC Mission in Exile of Mr Oliver Tambo and the new democratic dispensation of President Nelson Mandela,” Buthelezi said at the province’s municipal excellence awards in Durban on Thursday evening.
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“Prince Buthelezi kept the struggle alive in South Africa. When the apartheid regime had silenced both Tambo and Mandela, Buthelezi was the voice of the oppressed.
“The two statues in eThekwini are therefore incomplete without the statue of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi,” he said.
Earlier this month, President Cyril Ramaphosa unveiled the 10-metre tall statues of Mandela and Tambo as part of the municipality’s “heritage tourism strategy”.
Each statue cost R11 million.
The Tambo statue is at North Beach on the OR Tambo Parade, while the Mandela statue stands at the Moses Mabhida Stadium.
The statues have caused controversy in a metro that experiences almost daily unplanned water and electricity outages in many areas, and where other basic services go unattended for weeks.
Mayor Cyril Xaba has defended the project as a tourism investment, saying money for the statues was not diverted from service delivery, but the price tag has still caused consternation among squeezed ratepayers.
The Democratic Alliance has been among the loudest critics.
At the unveiling, the party staged a small protest, saying Durban residents needed functioning services rather than expensive monuments. The party’s mayoral candidate for the city, Haniff Hoosen, has called the statues a “vanity project”.
The DA and IFP – in which MEC Buthelezi is a senior member — are both part of KwaZulu-Natal’s government of provincial unity.
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Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who died in 2023 at the age of 95, remains one of the most contested figures in modern South African politics.
He founded and led Inkatha, later the IFP, for decades, served as chief minister of the former KwaZulu homeland during apartheid, and joined Nelson Mandela’s cabinet after the democratic transition in 1994.
His legacy is a divisive one. Buthelezi has long been accused of working too closely with the apartheid state, while Inkatha, under his presidency, has been linked to some of the deadliest political violence in the transition years.
In August last year, the provincial government launched his place of rest at KwaPhindangene Royal Residence in Mahlabathini as a provincial heritage site.