Daily Inspiration Quote by Mangosuthu Buthelezi

Buthelezi is doing two things at once: staking a moral claim and quietly laundering responsibility. The first clause is an appeal to conscience - Christianity as a political compass, nonviolence as personal brand and public vow. In apartheid-era South Africa, that mattered. It positioned him against the romance of guerrilla struggle and in competition with liberation movements that could justify force as necessity. He’s asserting legitimacy in a crowded, deadly field: I am the leader who can speak the language of peace without sounding like a collaborator.

Then comes the pivot that gives the line its real charge: “But people take their own initiatives.” It’s a classic leader’s hedge, the kind that reads like restraint while functioning as permission. If violence happens, it is regrettable, spontaneous, regrettably out of his hands. That rhetorical move lets him inhabit innocence and influence at the same time.

The phrase “a Lebanon type of situation” is not a neutral comparison; it’s a warning shot. Lebanon in the late 1970s and 1980s signified factional civil war, militias, proxy conflicts, state breakdown. By invoking it, Buthelezi frames political violence not as a coherent strategy but as chaotic sectarian drift, something that can swallow everyone. Subtext: I’m trying to hold the center, but the center may not hold - and if it collapses, blame the conditions, not the leadership.

The intent is survival: to condemn armed struggle while signaling he understands the forces that produce it, keeping his hands “clean” without severing ties to those who won’t stay peaceful.