The NFP has also requested Mbali Shinga to resign from her role as MEC for Social Development.
Hours after withdrawing from the governing KZN provincial coalition, the National Freedom Party (NFP) has fired off several warnings to residents and lambasted its former partners.
The NFP announced its withdrawal from the government of provincial unity (GPU) this week, also calling for their MPL in the legislature, Mbali Shinga, to resign from her post as MEC of Social Development.
NFP President Ivan Barnes said on Friday that he had often complained about the high levels of corruption under KZN Premier Thami Ntuli.
Barnes said the NFP refused to remain silent as democracy’s values are “undermined”.
“KwaZulu-Natal today faces a collapse of governance at both provincial and municipal levels. Service delivery has become inconsistent, inadequate, and in many communities, entirely absent,” he said.
“Infrastructure continues to deteriorate, eroding public confidence and worsening the lived realities of our people,” he said.
Corruption
He said politicians continue to enrich themselves while residents of KZN suffer.
“We are governed by rogue rulers, not representatives, by men who invoke the Constitution while violating its spirit with impunity. The NFP warns the people of KwaZulu-Natal that we stand on the precipice.
“The political elites of the ANC, IFP, and DA have demonstrated a reckless willingness to burn this province to preserve power and privilege, with no regard for the future of the next generation.”
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Slamming former partners
He said he was shocked that the DA is willing to remain in what he described as a corrupt government, despite being known for exposing ANC corruption in government.
“It has chosen to sacrifice morality and ethical principle at the altar of political expediency, thereby entangling itself in the very corruption it claims to oppose,” he said.
Barnes believes that KZN is no longer governed in the democratic sense of the word.
“What parades as a provincial government is an arrangement devoid of moral legitimacy, constitutional fidelity, and popular consent.
“Democracy has been reduced to ritual and performance—invoked in speeches, buried in practice. This is not misrule; it is counter-revolution institutionalised,” he said.
Before pulling out of the coalition government, Barnes had engagements with the leadership of the ANC and IFP; he complained to them about the high levels of corruption under the people they had deployed to government positions. He had demanded that IFP bring another premier candidate and that the ANC also bring in new MECs and replace the tainted ones.
But this did not happen.
“The Democratic Alliance’s political gymnastics and the ANC’s survival through opportunistic alliances reveal a shared elite logic – power first, people last. Legality without legitimacy is tyranny.
“Coalitions are not the problem. The problem is the systematic violation of democratic processes, the manipulation of councils, and the conversion of governance into a transactional marketplace,” he said.
The ANC has lost most of its power in municipalities and in the provincial legislature, but Barnes said they were now colluding with the IFP in what he described as a marriage of convenience.
“The ANC and IFP parades themselves as the heirs of our democracy, and today they are holding hands as newlyweds, yet it is in the public domain that the IFP, before the 2024 national and provincial elections made unequivocally clear through its president, Hlabisa, on national television, saying where they will govern in KZN, they will not work with the ANC.
“But moments after elections, he changed his tune just because their masters whispered ding dong bells in their ears before the formation of the GNU.”
A new coalition
The NFP had previously supported the MK party’s motion of no confidence against Premier Thami Ntuli; its latest move to withdraw from the coalition now creates a stalemate in the 80-seat provincial legislature.
This means the ANC, IFP, and DA coalition has 40 seats, while the MK party-led side has 40. They are supported by two seats from the EFF and one from the NFP.
Mbali Shinga
The MK party failed to remove Ntuli as premier late last year after the NFP’s Shinga refused to support the motion of no confidence.
Shinga is currently undergoing disciplinary proceedings for undermining the party’s decision.
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