Hartley Ragged Glory

The Rainbow Nation in Black and White
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-86842-557-0
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

As a leading political journalist and newspaper editor, Hartley had the best seat in the house for the unfolding drama of the new South Africa, as well as privileged access to many key players, including Nelson Mandela himself. Admirably concise but rich in detail, drawing on a wide spectrum of interviews, documents and experiences, Ragged Glory offers a bracingly critical look back at the achievements and the failures of two turbulent decades, during which South Africa took its place at the table of free nations but lost something of its moral authority. On a cold Highveld morning in May 1994, Nelson Mandela took the oath of office to become South Africa's first democratically elected president. A new era had begun. The promise of those heady days of political transition soon gave way to a more sober view on the magnitude of the challenges facing the new government. Under Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, the country grappled with the restructuring of the state, massive inequality and poverty, rising crime, battles over economic policy, the arms deal, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the BEE era, the cancer of political corruption and the rise of a new and predatory political elite. With the removal of Mbeki, followed by the interregnum of Kgalema Motlanthe, the stage was set for the coming to power of the controversial Jacob Zuma. All of these are key threads in Ray Hartley's rich and complex narrative history of the democratic era.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hartley, Ray

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1
Mandela’s thorny crown In December 1994, Nelson Mandela rose to deliver the ANC’s political report at the party’s elective conference on the campus of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. The moment, like so many in those early days of democracy, was heavy with irony. By night, former guerrillas, activists and prisoners slept in beds once the exclusive preserve of white Afrikaners, and, by day, plotted the way forward for the country’s government in dining halls and meeting rooms. In the eight months since his inauguration, Mandela had begun a transition of his own. The formal suits and ties of office were giving way to the colourful, casual ‘Madiba shirt’ that was to become his trademark. The main point of Mandela’s speech was that the ANC leadership had reached the end of its tether with the ‘power-sharing’ arrangement with the National Party of FW de Klerk, as embodied in the Government of National Unity. He dwelt at some length on the negotiating process and the accommodation of the former apartheid leadership during the transition, which had ‘with the minimum of disruption required their co-operation’. But, he observed, ‘the situation has markedly changed’.1 Mandela had tired of De Klerk’s insistence on a greater role in government, and he could not longer hide his disapproval of what he saw as De Klerk’s arrogance: ‘We should accept that it is the necessary thorny crown of leadership that, like a suitor, we have to patiently bring in line elements whose own sense of self-importance lies in making a relationship tempestuous. We have to understand the reasons behind this, at the same time as we challenge the false notion that the Government of National Unity arrangement is God-given, and therefore, that governance and investor confidence would collapse without the participation of forces other than the majority party.’2 The ‘thorny crown’, with its reference to religious martyrdom, was a powerful image. Being in government had posed new, ‘thorny’ challenges for the ANC, which it had not faced as a liberation movement. Among these was the constitutional requirement that the leaders of the ruling party and the official opposition – Mandela and De Klerk – serve together in a government of national unity. Prior to the 1994 election, Mandela had frequently accused De Klerk of supporting political violence with the objective of weakening the ANC. In June 1992, he had even called off negotiations, following the Boipatong massacre, in which forty-one people had been killed by residents of a hostel controlled by the Zulu nationalist party, Inkatha. Visiting the scene of the killings, Mandela said: ‘I am convinced we are no longer dealing with human beings but animals … We will not forget what Mr de Klerk, the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party have done to our people. I have never seen such cruelty.’3 De Klerk had retaliated with accusations that the ANC was deeply involved with the violence, but the truth was that he needed Mandela more than Mandela needed him. In December 1994 they travelled to Oslo, Norway, jointly to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and appeared to make an effort to be seen to be getting along, although Mandela would continue to question De Klerk’s involvement in violence even as he said he was a worthy co-recipient of the prize. When Mandela had arrived at the Union Buildings in May 1994 to take occupation of De Klerk’s old suite of offices, the atmosphere was hardly welcoming. The offices had been left bare, and there were no staff to be seen. At his side was Joel Netshitenzhe, one of the party’s leading intellectuals, whom Mandela would use to drive his presidency. ‘He gets to the office a day or two after the inauguration and the place was empty, not even the smell of coffee. Empty desks, empty shelves, empty spaces. People had to construct the presidency from scratch,’ Netshitenzhe recalls of that first day. Mandela’s response was to call a meeting of the office staff for the next morning. He turned on the Mandela charm, shaking their hands and assuring them that no one would lose their jobs. He would remember their names and ask after their families whenever he saw them. The Afrikaner secretaries that he kept on would become loyal members of staff. He retained a major on his staff even though the man had been accused of helping to bomb an ANC building. His attitude was: ‘So what? I work in government with people who have done worse things than that.’4 The soft-spoken Netshitenzhe, a returned ANC exile who had worked closely with Thabo Mbeki, recalls that Mandela stressed his administration would follow a ‘law-governed approach’. The rules of the civil service would be followed to the letter. Although Netshitenzhe was by then a senior figure in the ANC, he had to apply for his position in the presidency, submitting his CV and assuring the bureaucrats who ran the public service that he was not in breach of civil service rules by holding inappropriate political office. Another thorn in the crown was the need to restructure a morass of apartheid-era administrations into a single unified state. The Interim Constitution dictated the framework, but actually pulling it off would require one of the most thorough legislative overhauls ever attempted by a new government. The legal process had begun six months prior to the inauguration, when the Transitional Executive Council, representing all parties, had taken over the running of the country and overseen the passing of countless laws to shape the new state. At the apex of the ‘new’ state stood the national government, voted into office for the first time by all adult South Africans. Below this were the nine new provinces, an amalgamation of the apartheid era’s four provinces and numerous so-called bantustans, or ‘homelands’ – ethnically defined areas where blacks were supposedly allowed ‘self-determination’ under leaders who often styled themselves as ‘generalissimo’ and surrounded themselves with security thugs. What made matters worse was that the bantustans were geographically complex. The result of apartheid’s bizarre obsession with ethnicity, some had bits and pieces scattered all over the countryside wherever the same language group predominated. The apartheid-era map of South Africa resembled the pelt of a Friesian cow. For once, the overused adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ was an appropriate description of a bureaucracy. Take the ‘independent’ homeland of Bophuthatswana, which had resisted the transition until a bloody confrontation with armed right-wing militia on the eve of the election had forced it to capitulate. In the dying days of apartheid, it had banned political meetings and marches. Protesters had hit on the idea of assembling on the South African side of the ‘border’ to air their grievances. I recall reporting on one protest where the South African and Bophuthatswana police were unsure of where the border fell. After much toing and froing, they and the protesters finally agreed. Using chalk from a nearby school, a large South African policeman bent down and drew an impossibly weak white line on the tarmac. ‘Daar’s hy!’ (There it is!), he said in Afrikaans. It was a fine illustration of how absurd the homeland system had become. Absurd or not, the apartheid machinery had gone to great lengths to give these homelands the appearance of real states. They had parliaments, police forces, armies and even embassies in countries cynical enough to accept their pretence at statehood. Some of these bantustan administrations would have to be divided up among more than one of the nine new provinces. The boundaries of the new provinces were more or less based on nine economically integrated zones delineated by the Development Bank of South Africa. The homeland thorn would be removed, but South Africa would have to accommodate its bureaucrats in the new central government and provinces. A ‘sunset’ clause agreed on in the constitutional negotiations prohibited the firing of civil servants, and it had been agreed that each of the new provinces would have premiers who were empowered to appoint cabinets consisting of members of executive councils, soon to be known simply as ‘MECs’. They would manage departments, ten for each province, with the equivalent of directors-general and support staff. Provincial departments would account to elected legislatures, with all the paraphernalia of parliaments. The premiers’ offices would include advisers, lawyers and consultants as they grew into mini-presidencies. All these new bureaucrats would require substantial salaries, while some would insist on expensive cars. The burden on the fiscus would increase dramatically. All of this had been agreed to during the constitutional negotiations, where each of the major parties – the ANC, the National Party and Inkatha – had its own motive for wanting the cumbersome new provincial structure. For the ANC, the provincial governments would offer employment to thousands of activists and exiles expecting to benefit from democracy. They were convenient parking places for those who would otherwise find themselves unemployed, disgruntled and perhaps even prone to rebellion. For the previously white National Party and Inkatha, the devolution of power entailed by the pretence at federalism offered a way of counteracting the authority of an ANC national government. Inkatha saw the possibility of winning power in the new KwaZulu-Natal province and extending the political life of the...