Apartheid's hard man

2006-11-01 11:24

Donwald Pressly

Cape Town - Former Prime Minister and later State President Pieter Willem (PW) Botha was a man who by 1989 had lost the political plot as well as control of the ruling National Party.

Botha, 90, died at his home in The Wilderness - near to George which served as his parliamentary constituency - on Tuesday night.

A number of unplanned events may have fast-tracked the transition from a siege state - characterised under his presidency from 1978 by regular states of emergency, political detention and the maintenance of a continued ban on the liberation movements including the African National Congress.

First it was his stroke of January 1989 which incapacitated him. He stood down as National Party leader - and as Anthony Sampson puts it in his biography of Nelson Mandela - he "unwisely assumed he could remain State President".

Perhaps, wrongly Botha's political legacy is thus defined not so much by the oppressive nature of his regime with a fiscal emphasis on the needs of an ever expanding defence force and dubious actions of the security police, but by his 11th hour meeting with Mandela.

With the National Party having chosen an apparent conservative, FW de Klerk, as its leader - who went on to promise the end to discrimination and a democratic constitution, albeit still emphasising group rights, PW tried to snatch the political upper ground by inviting Mandela to come to see him.

As Sampson reports, Botha's intelligence officer Niel Barnard was asked by Botha: "When is Mandela coming to see me?"

At the time Mandela had served nearly 27 years in prison. They met on July 4, 1989 at Tuynhuys, with Mandela entering secretly by lift. They spoke about such matters as South African history, the Boer War, and homeland dictator Kaizer Matanzima in the Transkei - a relative of Mandela.

Significantly Mandela asked for the release of all political prisoners. Botha politely refused. Yet, curiously Mandela was reported to have a better rapport with Botha than with De Klerk.

Lost the political plot

Botha had by then lost the political plot and his attempt to upstage De Klerk failed. Botha resigned within six weeks of the meeting with Mandela.

By February 1990, De Klerk, now president himself, had unbanned the ANC, Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and the South African Communist Party.

Political prisoners, including Mandela, were also released. De Klerk achieved everything that PW had failed to do in one fell swoop.

Botha became Prime Minister in 1978 when Prime Minister John Vorster became president - who later lost the job as a result of the information scandal.

Botha, who had been recruited by the erstwhile Prime Minister DF Malan to be a National Party organiser in the 1940s, became State president with executive powers.

According to They Shaped Our Century published by Human & Rousseau, Botha really made his mark from 1966 when the apartheid architect HF Verwoerd, then prime minister, appointed him minister of defence.

Significantly only recently Botha described the word "apartheid" as a misunderstood Afrikaans word which simply had meant "good neighbourliness". It was the result of his interventions that the South African Defence Force became involved in wars in Angola and Mozambique as he obsessively fought what he described as "the total onslaught" of communism.

He was also behind the conscription of all white males to the defence force. Effectively the protracted war in Angola and Namibia failed. His enemy, the MPLA, took power in Angola and in Namibia - then South West Africa - his enemy, the South West African People's Organisation swept the elections there in 1989.

SA supported Frelimo

The same occurred in Mozambique with Frelimo - where South Africa had supported the opposition Renamo.

Botha is described as a reformer by some. It was he who drove the process of setting up minor houses of parliament for coloureds and Indians. But power remained firmly in white - Afrikaner - hands in terms of the tricameral constitution.

While to the black community these reforms were meaningless, they were of enough significance in white politics to force a split with a sizeable chunk of the National Party forming the Conservative Party under former minister Andries Treurnicht in 1982. It became the official opposition in 1987 in the white House of Assembly, a position it retained until 1994.

In 1986, the public relations spin from his National Party that he would make dramatic changes with regard to the rights of black South Africans in his so-called Rubicon speech at the NP congress in Durban failed spectacularly.

The rand fell alarmingly against other currencies when he failed to produce the goods.

Botha presided over a tragic period of National Party administration when some of the worst excesses of its rule occurred - including military interventions against neighbouring states, detention of scores of political prisoners under apartheid laws and some of the worst human rights violations.

He ignored a plea from Archbishop Desmond Tutu - who was chair of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - to apologise to those who had suffered under apartheid.

Botha remained stern and defiant about the evils of apartheid to the end.

- I-Net Bridge (News24)