JOHANNESBURG — President Thabo Mbeki, riding high after an overwhelming election victory last week, faces his first challenge — negotiating terms with his longtime rival and governing partner, Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
Mr. Buthelezi held senior posts in the past two governments, an arrangement seen as crucial to maintaining peace and stability in the eastern province of KwaZulu Natal, where hundreds died in pre-election clashes in 1993.
But Mr. Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) won only 28 seats in the 400-seat parliament in last Wednesday’s election, in which Mr. Mbeki’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) captured almost 70 percent of the vote.
The ANC outpolled the IFP even in the opposition party’s home province of KwaZulu Natal, where Mr. Buthelezi’s largely Zulu party has ruled since 1994.
The ANC won 38 of the 80 seats in the provincial legislature while the IFP took 30. The remaining 12 went to smaller parties. The IFP said yesterday it planned to challenge the result, citing 50 complaints about election irregularities.
If the outcome stands, the ANC legally could form a coalition government by working with the smaller parties, but seems unlikely to follow that course. Party spokesman Smuts Ngonyama said Friday a deal with the IFP already was being discussed.
“The people of the province want the ANC and the IFP to run KwaZulu Natal together,” he told a local newspaper, adding that both parties would need to get off their “high horses” and cooperate.
In the past two administrations, Mr. Buthelezi, 75, has been given the Home Affairs portfolio, a ministry that controls passports, visas and immigration.
Under his leadership, the ministry has grown increasingly corrupt, with officials taking bribes in exchange for passports and residence permits.
Mr. Buthelezi argues that the government failed to provide sufficient funds to run the department and that, with too few staff members, delays had set in which encouraged people to offer bribes for faster service.
“The baseline of the Treasury is too low,” Mr. Buthelezi told The Washington Times last year.
“We have 1,500 vacancies in the department that cannot be filled because we don’t have the money. The government has chosen to give me a portfolio in which I am condemned whatever I do. It is an unwinnable situation.”
Relations between Mr. Buthelezi and Mr. Mbeki were so strained before last week’s election that the two men ended up in court in a dispute over immigration policy.
Now they will have to decide not only whether Mr. Buthelezi keeps the Home Affairs portfolio but who will lead the new provincial government in KwaZulu Natal — a position that will go to the ANC for the first time, based on the strength of its plurality in the province.
The ANC’s provincial chairman, S’bu Ndebele, is largely credited with lifting his party’s vote in KwaZulu Natal from 39 percent in the 1999 election to 47 percent last week, and he has his eyes on the premiership.
But sources in the national government say that Jacob Zuma, who has served as Mr. Mbeki’s vice president for the past five years, might be “encouraged” to take the job.
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