IFP expands footprint beyond KZN, targets national growth

The IFP says its strongest-ever showing outside KwaZulu-Natal signals a decisive break with its image as a regional party. IFP leader Velenkosini Hlabisa said the party will field more councillor candidates in this year's election compared to the 2021 election. The Inkatha Freedom Party has rejected being defined as a regional party and is set to field more than 3 000 councillor candidates in the November 4 local government elections. IFP President Velenkosini Hlabisa, speaking at a media briefing this week, said the party would field 3 188 councillor candidates in the elections, up from 2 570 in 2021. Significantly, the party has fielded more ward candidates than proportional representation candidates, which Hlabisa said reflected direct participation by communities rather than reliance on party-selected PR lists. 'Our expansion beyond KwaZulu-Natal is particularly significant. The number of councillor candidates contesting elections outside our traditional stronghold demonstrates that the IFP continues to grow across the country. 'It also reinforces a point we have consistently made: the IFP is not a regional party,' Hlabisa said. He added that the IFP was also establishing structures in municipalities across the country, including in Limpopo, the Free State and Mpumalanga. In the City of Johannesburg, where the IFP has named councillor Mlungisi Mabaso as its mayoral candidate, the party is contesting 108 wards, an increase from the previous local government elections. In eThekwini, party spokesperson and Deputy Minister of Transport Mkhuleko Hlengwa is the party's mayoral candidate, alongside deputy mayoral candidate Sizwe Skhakhane. Hlabisa pointed to the demographic mix of the candidate list as further evidence of its broadening appeal, highlighting increased representation from white and Indian communities, as well as a candidate body dominated by women and youth. 'We reject the outdated characterisation of the IFP as a party belonging to one ethnic group,' he said. Since its founding in 1975 by the late Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the IFP has historically been associated with Zulu traditionalism and its KwaZulu-Natal base. Its earliest footprint outside the province relied heavily on a support base among Zulu migrant workers in Gauteng hostel complexes. Political analyst Professor Musa Xulu observed that the party's current momentum extends beyond the legacy of the late Buthelezi or Hlabisa's leadership alone. Xulu noted that the IFP's core traditionalist appeal was increasingly finding resonance in urban centres such as Soweto, driven in part by broader voter disillusionment with the ANC. 'If you noticed, the IFP has been winning by-elections since the 2016 local government elections, and most of those wards were previously under ANC control,' said Xulu. He argued that these results indicated growing disillusionment with the ANC and suggested that some voters were reconsidering the governance delivered by the ANC since the first democratic elections in 1994. 'This is a clear indication that people were beginning to lose hope that the liberal democracy brought by the ANC was yielding the results they expected, prompting them to return to their traditional systems,' Xulu noted, adding that traditional structures were often perceived as providing greater institutional stability than parliamentary politics.