The IFP has challenged the Editor of the City Press, Mondli Makhanya, to provide evidence that the late IFP founder Mangosuthu Buthelezi sanctioned the killings in a number of townships in Gauteng and Kwazulu-Natal in the late 80s and early 90s.
This follows an article in the paper yesterday (10/09), in which Makhanya, a longtime critic of Buthelezi, said the IFP leader has a lot of blood on his hands and actively collaborated with the apartheid government. It is a claim that Buthelezi has long denied.
IFP Spokesperson Mkululeko Hlengwa says that Makhanya must prove his claims against Buthelezi, who died on Saturday at the age of 95.
“Mondli Makhanya has a biased reading of history and no acknowledgement of the atrocities of that violence in which 20 000 people died and 12 thousand were IFP people. The question is who killed those IFP people at whose instruction? Mondli must present evidence of Prince Buthelezi ordering these hits and ordering this violence. He can’t just make categorical statements that Buthelezi was the killer; where is the evidence to back it up? You see, the danger with uncontested statements is that they become the truth, and we have been calling on Mondli Makhanya to provide proof for years on end now, and he has never done so.”
