The National Party has replaced the Freedom Front as the ANC’s sweetheart, reports Marion Edmunds
The African National Congress has jilted its Afrikaner sweetheart, the Freedom Front, and is courting the National Party, not out of love, but political need. Over the past few weeks, the ANC has realised more than ever that it needs the NP’s support if it wants its way in writing not only the final constitution, but also the KwaZulu-Natal provincial constitution. This was demonstrated last week by the panic that ensued when the NP appeared to be supporting the Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu-Natal in constitutional negotiations, and the ANC appeared to be losing ground. ANC and NP provincial negotiators were summoned to Cape Town, and the NP was told by ANC leaders, including Cyril Ramaphosa, that it had to remember that it was a party credited with democratising South Africa, and that it should not help the IFP to preserve an undemocratic state in KwaZulu-Natal. `We want the NP’s co-operation in order to improve the constitution-making process and that cannot be done if we push the constitution through the way the IFP is intending us to do,’ said ANC MP Carl Niehaus before that meeting. It is ironic that the ANC should feel the need to make that sort of appeal to the NP, given that its members have been spitting insults at the NP in Parliamentary sessions, preferring to use the FF to effect reconciliation with the Afrikaner community. The FF acknowledges that, in the constitutional stakes, it is now second-best. Its chief negotiator Corne Mulder said this week: ` The ANC needs the NP more than the FF because it needs the Nats’ support to get a two-thirds majority to pass the final constitution.’ The ANC is choosing a path of qualified co-operation with the NP because it wants the constitution to be passed first time round. If the Constitutional Assembly (CA) does not pass the constitution with a two-thirds majority, there will have to be a national referendum, something all politicians would rather do without at this stage. The FF has been feeling the chill since President Nelson Mandela’s anti-volkstaat statements on the ANC’s birthday. Bilateral talks on a volkstaat have failed to get off the ground, and the FF executive had an emergency meeting at the weekend to discuss the future. Corne Mulder said this week the FF would not budge on its demands for a territorial homeland. Mandela’s statements are something of a death-knell, then, given that a volkstaat is the FF’s defining issue. Mulder admitted his party had been floundering in the constitutional negotiations, partly because it lacked the experience of negotiating the interim constitution at the World Trade Centre. `We are at a disadvantage, we have not built up the personal relations that other parties have,’ he said. These special relationships include the one between the NP’s Roelf Meyer and the ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa.
Mulder is critical of the turn negotiations have taken, with bilaterals weaving a skein of mystery around the public discussions in the parliamentary chamber. `This is shadow-boxing. We are dodging the real issues and people are just pushing papers backwards and forwards,’ he said. `There are some problems that no amount of bilaterals are going to solve … We need political decisions and these will only be taken if party leaders sit around a table and take them.’ NP chief negotiator Roelf Meyer denied this week the NP and the ANC’s relationship had shifted gear. `I won’t say there is a change … but there is a general will to get consensus on the constitution in on-going talks.’ he said. The NP does not take the prospect of a territorial volkstaat seriously. The NP can afford to be even-tempered about its relationship with the ANC because it knows the ANC needs its co-operation. The FF has run out of bargaining chips and, with only nine members in the CA, it is not a force to be reckoned with, unless it manages to attract the newly-forming Afrikaner lobby.