The party that built apartheid and turned South Africa into a pariah state completed its march to oblivion on Saturday by deciding to merge with its one-time nemesis, the African National Congress.
The New National Party, heir of a mighty movement that jailed Nelson Mandela and built nuclear bombs, said its shrunken membership would dissolve and fight future elections under the banner of the black ruling party.
A meeting of the NNP’s federal council proposed that members join the ANC, a bitterly ironic twist for a party founded almost a century ago to promote the interests of white Afrikaners and keep blacks from power.
Officials are to retain their party membership and parliamentary and local government seats as a transitional arrangement until September 2005. ‘Individual members of the NNP would be encouraged to join the ANC in their respective localities. The NNP will in future contest elections under the banner of the ANC,’ the NNP said in a statement.
Moisua Lekota, the Defence Minister, an ANC heavyweight nicknamed Terror during the struggle, welcomed the decision.
Just a decade ago such a marriage would have been dismissed as a surreal impossibility, but the NNP is so enfeebled from successive electoral batterings that the wonder yesterday was how it managed to last so long since dismantling apartheid.
In the first democratic elections in 1994 it won 20% of the vote by promising to defend the rights of whites and coloureds, those of mixed race, in a black-dominated ANC-led government.
When FW de Klerk stepped down as leader two years later, the party lost a towering figure and direction. The Nobel laureate’s successor, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was derisively nicknamed kortbroek (short pants). Tasked with transforming a racist dinosaur, he borrowed from Tony Blair by putting ‘New’ in front of National Party and rebranded it as a mixed-race movement committed to the ideals of Desmond Tutu’s ‘rainbow nation’.
Its shrivelled support in Western Cape bought an alliance with the ANC, which was a few votes shy of a majority in the provincial legislature, but the writing was on the wall in April’s election when its national vote collapsed to 1,7%.
Whites disgruntled with the ANC backed the Democratic Alliance and other opposition parties that were more vocal in criticising the ruling party, which won more than two-thirds of the vote.
Van Schalkwyk was appointed Tourism and Environmental Affairs Minister by President Thabo Mbeki, but his party lacked resources and morale. On Saturday he said he would join the ANC within weeks.
Formed in 1914 by General JBM Hertzog, the NNP became a hardline Afrikaner party under Daniel Malan and in 1948 took power and entrenched the politics of racial separation. As opposition grew, it turned South Africa into a police state which murdered, tortured and jailed dissidents. It is difficult to find anyone today who admits supporting them, but the party enjoyed widespread white backing for decades.
South African politician Mangosuthu Buthelezi said on Saturday that Aids had killed his daughter, his second child to die from the disease this year, and slammed the government’s handling of the pandemic.
Buthelezi, head of the Inkatha Freedom party, is one of the few high-profile figures to talk candidly about the disease that affects 10% of the population. ‘Tragically, Mandisi’s untimely death should have been averted, for she also succumbed to the disease that is unmercifully mowing down many of our people,’ he said at his daughter’s funeral in Mahlabathini in KwaZulu-Natal province. – Guardian Unlimited Â