SOUTH AFRICA: Tutu says nation needs new political party to counter ANC

By Frank Jomo, October 06, 2008 [Ecumenical News International, Cape Town] South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has said he supports the formation of a new political party in South Africa because the country has effectively become a one-party state that needs a strong opposition.

"I would think you really need to have a viable opposition ... one that gives the impression that it could become an alternative government. We do not have anything like that just now and that is probably not such a good thing," Tutu told South Africa's largest circulation newspaper, the Sunday Times.

The former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town was commenting on a rift that has rocked South Africa's ruling African National Congress party following the ousting of former president Thabo Mbeki on September 20. Talk is rife in South Africa that a splinter party from the ANC will be launched soon.

Tutu said the split in the ANC had left South Africans feeling unsure and threatened, and it was possible the turmoil could "turn the country into a banana republic."

"I pray that it does not happen, but we could easily find ourselves in a situation where we have a series of sort of mini-coups," he said. "I know it is not a coup because it has been done in terms of the constitution, in some ways, and thoroughly bloodless."

On Jacob Zuma, who is touted to become South African president after elections next year, Tutu said the ANC president should decline to accept office as president of South Africa as long as a cloud of alleged corruption in a 30 billion rand (US$4.2 billion) arms deal hangs over his head.

"Let us do all we can to clear this baggage away ... at the moment there is very little accountability. ANC leaders are accountable, as it were, to themselves, and only once in a while do they really have to account to the people. It is not healthy for everybody involved," said Tutu.

Mbeki resigned from office after his party recalled him following a ruling by KwaZulu Natal provincial High Court Judge Chris Nicholson that the National Prosecuting Authority was taking orders from the executive and had not acted properly.

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