In all the entertainment that comes with how former IFP president Mangosuthu Buthelezi answers questions at press conferences, it is sometimes easy for a key and central message to be lost.
Reporters guffawed earlier this week when he ended a 16-minute response to a question with this Buthelezi classic: "I am not a moron or an idiot. I was not born yesterday too. I think some of you have known me for some time, I am not an ass."
That final part of his last sentence has since gone viral on social media, even sparking some banter over whether he had pronounced the last word the same way one would the synonym of a donkey or if it had come out as if he was referring to a person's buttocks.
Buthelezi had called the press conference in his capacity as the traditional prime minister to the Zulu king, and not as the founder of the IFP or a politician.
But in answering a question about the status of King Misuzulu kaZwelithini's security detail and the war of words that had ensued between Buthelezi and the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal over the issue, he ended up devoting much time to his long list of grievances against the governing party.
These are well documented and there is no need to repeat them in this column.
But the key message that seemed to be lost in what Buthelezi was saying at that press conference is that he is seeking reconciliation.
After detailing what he described as numerous efforts at making peace with various ANC leaders - including its past presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki - and how these were apparently scuppered by the governing party's KwaZulu-Natal leadership, the 92-year-old Buthelezi said: "I am aware that I am living by God's grace now. At my age, each day is by God's grace and I can go any time.
"And I said I would like, when I close my eyes, to close the wound between us and the ANC."
Political violence between supporters of the IFP and the ANC was responsible for thousands of lives that were lost in townships, villages and elsewhere between 1984 and the democratic breakthrough in 1994.
Much of this violence was sponsored and promoted by the apartheid state, which employed the divide-and-rule strategy as part of its efforts to weaken the resistance movement.
But the two political parties should also have shouldered much of the blame for failing to prevent their disagreements over approaches to the fight against apartheid from escalating into a bloody conflict that cost so many lives and destroyed families and communities.
Political violence between supporters of the IFP and the ANC was responsible for thousands of lives that were lost in townships, villages and elsewhere between 1984 and the democratic breakthrough in 1994
Fortunately, the arrival of the democratic order in the mid-1990s meant the end of the violent conflict between the IFP and the ANC, as well as the return of peace in many parts of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal that had been ravaged by the violence.
However, too many individuals and communities remain with deep scars that cannot be healed by an elite pact between the leaders of the once-warring political parties.
The vast majority of the victims and survivors were not even involved in politics, and so none of the parties can claim to speak on their behalf.
Their pain and suffering have never been acknowledged by the parties and leaders in whose names acts of violence and counter-violence were committed.
One cannot predict if the ANC and the IFP will be able to "close the wound", as per Buthelezi's stated wish, before he closes his eyes, as he puts it.
However, perhaps the veteran politician, whose interventions in some of the
recent conflicts in parliament have earned him the status of a statesman in the
eyes of some citizens, can use the time that remains to lead a different reconciliation initiative - one that will see political parties and leaders going to communities that once regarded them as "enemies" to seek atonement for the crimes perpetrated in those parties' names.
To do this, Buthelezi need not wait for the ANC, which is too embroiled in its own internal feud to pay any attention to the past or the future.
Such a move may not "close the wound" between the ANC and the IFP, or address Buthelezi's long-standing grievances against the party he grew up in, but it would be a great legacy to leave behind.
For what legacy can be greater than making peace?
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