What might have happened had PW Botha
not succumbed to a stroke and handed power to his successor?
4
Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: Rand Daily
Mail
CHAOS,
in local politics anyway, apparently spirals downward. Channelling their
"inner EFF", ANC Cape Town city councillors last week decided to
mimic their national foes by imitating the disruptive tactics of Julius
Malema's opposition fighters and applying them in one of the few places where
the party finds itself in opposition.
DA
mayor Patricia de Lille, with a leaf from the book of parliamentary Speaker
Baleka Mbete, obliged them by calling in the police to lock them out.
The
clichés "when the shoe is on the other foot" and "imitation is
the sincerest form of flattery" hardly seem to do justice to this latest
act in the theatre of the absurd, which seems to substitute for real debate in
our national melodrama.
One
of the items on the council agenda that inspired the EEF-like tactics of the
local ANC was the decision to rename a portion of Table Bay Boulevard in honour
of former president FW de Klerk.
Strangely
enough, for a party that believes the majority is always right, it opposed a
decision that obtained more than 75% public support and had been endorsed by
local luminaries such as Desmond Tutu.
Elsewhere
in South Africa, street renaming has some ANC provenance.
Since
Table Bay Boulevard is a motorway rather than a residential road, it should
also be less inconvenient than matters doubtless were for, let us say,
residents of Cowey Road in Durban.
They
woke up one day a few years ago in the city of my birth to discover, courtesy
of the local ANC council, that they now resided in "Problem Mkhize Road''.
Mkhize was a big figure in the local MK structures but not perhaps a person of
world renown. And, just maybe, reselling your home in a street beginning with
the name "Problem'' might be, well, problematic.
No
matter. The objection to De Klerk was not that he did not make history, with
his epoch-changing speech in Parliament 25 years ago this week but that, for
the national majority, or at least their leaders, he was on the wrong side of
it.
Of
course, for the majority of residents in Cape Town, De Klerk was their
political leader of choice in the two elections he contested at the helm of his
party.
In
the first democratic poll in 1994 and the local government election which
followed it in 1996, they voted in large numbers for him. So if street names,
in part, should reflect the preferences of local residents, this small matter
should be both uncontroversial and democratically appropriate.
But
the big controversy around this was captured by ANC council leader Tony
Ehrenreich, who also moonlights as Cosatu's Western Cape secretary, or perhaps
the other way around. He said De Klerk was "an architect of apartheid and
responsible for implementing a system that brutally oppressed the
majority".
Actually,
it would be more accurate to say that De Klerk's party and even his family (his
uncle was the hard-line prime minister JG Strijdom) were the architects. But I
quibble. The crux of the Ehrenreich objection appears in the next line:
"[De Klerk] was an accident of history who just happened to be the leader
of the National Party and was forced to negotiate with the ANC."
As
British journalist Andrew Rawnsley wrote in another context: "That's
post-hoc analysis from Professor Harry Hindsight at the Faculty of Wise After
the Fact."
While
South Africa seems to have many graduates from Professor Hindsight's faculty
these days, it is perhaps worth reframing the question and the day on which De
Klerk turned his back on 350 years of history and started a process that would
see him ejected from supreme power in just four years.
Of
all the "what if?" questions, let us entertain the Ehrenreich theory
at its root.
What
might have been or might not have happened had PW Botha not succumbed to a
severe stroke the year before and reluctantly handed the reins of power to his
successor, or had them forced from his hand to be perfectly accurate?
Strangely
enough, one person far more significant than the latter-day re-writers of
history who believed it made little difference was none other than the mighty
Nelson Mandela. He once told me, to my surprise, that he "far preferred
dealing with Botha than with De Klerk".
Last
week, I discovered I was hardly alone in being startled by this observation.
Former
British Ambassador to South Africa Robin Renwick has produced his own account
of the dramatic transition from apartheid to democracy entitled Mission to
South Africa — Diary of a Revolution.
In
some ways the book is a mixed bag. The prose is lumpy and it doesn't drop names
so much as carpet-bomb the reader with them. It also covers a lot of already
very well-trodden turf.
But
Renwick was certainly a star in the diplomatic firmament and, as a top-ranking
ambassador, a very accurate recorder of intimate encounters with the good and
the great.
He
recounts, after his retirement from his post here and Mandela's election as
president, that he went to visit the icon in Pretoria to discuss the trashing
of De Klerk.
He
writes: "Whatever [Mandela's and De Klerk's] disagreements, I reminded him
he should please bear in mind that, but for De Klerk, he would not have been
elected president and might still be in jail.
"Mandela
characteristically informed his assistant that the 'ambassador is right'
(though I had ceased to be one), adding that De Klerk had richly deserved his
Nobel Peace Prize, 'for he had made peace possible'."
Case
closed.
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