Bantu Holomisa, deputy minister of tourism and environmental affairs, in The Mark Gevisser
‘My friend,” says Bantu Holomisa with his trademark imp-twinkle when asked about his role as deputy minister and his political ambitions, “you must remember that I have already tasted power. Absolute power. I’ve been there. I’ve had it all. Now I’m just responding to a call to help out.”
His particular way of ribbing, rather too dry to be a wisecrack, falls somewhere between self-deprecation and self-adulation. Responding to the fact that he constantly seems to be in trouble these days for speaking his mind, he urges this fledgling democracy to take a leaf out of his own book. “This new democratic government can learn one or two things about accountability from our military regime. Compared to this democracy, we [in the Transkei] were much more transparent.”
We find General Holomisa, military dictator turned environmentalist, sitting in the garden of his home in the Pretoria ministerial compound, reading the Sunday papers. Fully aware that we are coming to photograph him, he is wearing shorts; his nine-year-old’s basketball has been placed strategically nearby. It’s all very Boys’ Own; more Biggles than Bokassa.
A few years ago, political columnist Hugh Roberton compared Holomisa to Constand Viljoen, ascribing to both the “irrational naivete which afflicts so many military men who enter politics”. Both, like all good military commanders, have the common touch; both have a sentimental attachment to the common man, in whose name they moved from war to politics: Viljoen to save the Afrikaner from obliteration, Holomisa to save the Transkeian from corruption.
Coming from the classless security forces, Africa’s military leaders have often been — or claimed to be — the common-man antidotes to excessive neo-colonial emperors. I remember sitting behind Bantu Holomisa on a plane to Umtata in 1991. In jeans and a leather bomber- jacket, he got off the plane, picked up his luggage, got into a small car and drove off. No fanfare, no lackeys, no fuss. I thought of the legendary Thomas Sankara, the charismatic commander who took over Burkina Faso in a military coup, and then tried to institute a Marxist revolution from behind the wheel of a self-driven Renault 5.
There are some marked differences, though: there was no repression of dissent in Holomisa’s Transkei, and there was no ideology. The latter, perhaps, is the best way of understanding his present role, as loyal and disciplined maverick, in national politics. He is a very recent comrade indeed. He learnt about revolution and the African National Congress not on the Soweto streets or in Angolan camps, but from the other side: at Army College at Voortrekkerhoogte.
Matriculating in 1976, he went to Kaizer Matanzima’s army — recruited into an officers’ programme for the sons of chiefs — – rather than leaving the country to join Umkhonto weSizwe. He was virulently opposed to sanctions, and said, in 1988, that it would “not be wise” to unban the liberation movements as “we have an agreement with our neighbour, South Africa, that we will not use each other’s territory as a springboard to attack the other”.
But Holomisa was quick on the uptake: he won the support of Transkeians by seeking confrontation with Pretoria and allowing the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress to operate freely in his “liberated zone”. The watershed came in 1989, when he presided over the belated burial of exiled Thembu paramount chief Sabata Dalindyebo and announced that he would seek a referendum to rejoin South Africa. The funeral, festooned in ANC colours, stole FW de Klerk’s thunder and provided the first tangible sign of pending liberation.
Holomisa became a hero; the figure behind the scenes was none other than Winnie Mandela. In conversations and meetings over two years, she had nurtured him, brought him on board. Little wonder he is so fiercely loyal to her; that he regards her as South Africa’s primary “kingmaker”: he is one of her kinglets.
In partnership with her and the other men she drew close to her — Chris Hani, Peter Mokaba, Tony Yengeni — he attained immense grassroots popularity, coming first at the end of 1994 in an election for the ANC’s national executive committee. But he has never been a struggle-insider. He doesn’t use the language; he doesn’t obey the protocols.
And so he gets into trouble: by jumping to Winnie Mandela’s defence after her dismissal, by publicly challenging Nelson Mandela on a statement he made about corruption in the Transkei; and, more recently, by railing against the “elitists” in the ANC for trying to get rid of him.
This latest allegation was dispatched to the media, last November, in a turgid pages-long release replete with menagerie metaphor (“one cannot send a jackal to represent sheep in a conference of jackals where the subject matter is the slaughter of sheep”), in which Holomisa accused his enemies within the ANC of using the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) in an attempt to discredit him. It “chimed well”, he added, with the campaign against “so-called populists” in the party — and proceeded to upbraid the ANC for not taking action against those who would call him such.
There may well be an attempt to marginalise his clique within the ANC, and who is to say, these days, why and how the NIA chooses its targets? But to put the two together, as Holomisa did, is nothing short of paranoid. His paranoia, notes one senior government source, “is the result of him being a bit cut off. He is not in the thick of things, and so he perpetually feels he is being left out.”
Some in the ANC say he has marginalised himself by publicly identifying himself with Winnie while her other “friends” dived for cover; others say that he has foregone a pivotal role in government by not being more active, either as deputy minister or as a National Executive Committee member.
But even those who disapprove of him find it very difficult to dislike him. One member of the Eastern Cape government, angry at Holomisa for the appalling state of affairs in the Transkei, remembers being seated next to him at an event: “His opening gambit was an incorrigible smile: ‘I’ve left you with a real mess, haven’t I?’, he said. What could I say?”
Is Holomisa responsible for the mess? On several levels, he clearly is not: South Africa deliberately kept the Transkei in penury, and Holomisa had no option but to swell the ranks of the civil service. He was pretty much the homeland’s only employer. He certainly opened up the society, and tried valiantly, in his first couple of years, to stem the corruption that had set in under the Matanzimas. His first fallout with South Africa was over the extradition of Sol Kerzner after the casino-king was charged for paying R2-million to George Matanzima for gaming
No one has ever accused Holomisa — as they have the Sebes, the Mangopes and the Matanzimas — of being corrupt. But if his reason for seizing power in 1987 was to stamp out corruption, then the assessment must be, eight years later, that he failed miserably. His regime did not come close to stopping the rot.
Zam Titus, the Eastern Cape’s legal adviser who served Holomisa in the same capacity, gives two reasons for this: because there was “the lack of auditing on an annual basis”, and because the military council’s focus shifted, after only being in office for a year or so, from fighting corruption to “national politics and the unbanning of the liberation
Holomisa is very critical of the way the provincial government has handled the transformation, most of all the announcement that civil servants are going to be retrenched in droves: “The central government said, ‘you’ll have your job guaranteed’ to civil servants. But so far, my friend, the only people who have their jobs guaranteed are whites in South Africa. You can take me on record and I’m not apologetic. We are going backwards and forwards trying to make sure they are happy in their workplace. We don’t care about our blacks!”
People say he’s a populist as he plays to the crowds. Perhaps another way of putting it is that he speaks basic truths. But while his analysis might be correct, it is shadowed, once more, by dark conspiracies lurking at the gate. Disregarding the fact that it is none other than ANC stalwart Thozamile Botha who is wielding the axe in the province, Holomisa blames white National Party bureaucrats for deliberately plotting to alienate the ANC from its supporters in its strongest province.
He maintains that if the Transkei is a Wild West, this only came about after April 1994. “If you had come before 1994 to the Transkei, you would have seen, all systems were going well, although we were strangulated, we were managing. One town would have one police van to service half-a-million, but we survived harmoniously, we slept peacefully.” What changed is the government alienated the civil service, and so there was a breakdown in
His image of an Edenic ‘Kei under his command is hopelessly romantic. It is certainly true that, with a strong authority in Umtata, there was a semblance of control. But one Eastern Cape official said he was “horrified to discover how little was happening outside Umtata. What little money came into the homeland seemed to stay in the capital.” The people may well have loved Holomisa — but this is because he was a canny politician, and not because he was a good administrator.
Apart from an over-use of certain adjectives (“nefarious”, “nauseating”), Holomisa speaks a simple, ungrammatical, but sensible English. His grasp of environmental issues is impressive. But, say players in the sector, his record is patchy: sometimes he gets very involved, and drives things politically — like when he took up the cudgels against toxic waste dumping last year — but equally often, he’s just not around.
There was talk, following his tirade last November, that he was finally to be dumped from the cabinet. There is no sign of it, though: his political lifespan is closely linked to his relationship with the Mandelas, which verges on the Oedipal. In many ways, say people close to the president, he is the son Mandela never had. Like a stern but loving father, the old man chastises him — sometimes publicly — but keeps him close to his bosom and often uses him to say things that he cannot. Like a loving but ambitious prodigal son, Holomisa both respects Mandela and chafes against his authority.
In this context, Holomisa’s refusal to attend rallies “explaining” to the people why Winnie was fired has familial as well as political reverberations: he is determined to remain close to both his political parents.
The royal “we” is one verbal tic he has picked up from his mentor. He also refers to himself in the third person, as in: “Holomisa is not one to turn the other cheek when he is struck. Oh, no. Holomisa hits back.” This may well be born of arrogance, but it is also a sign of the man’s distance from his own actions; as if, almost Chaplinesque, the little man is trying on roles —the military dictator, the popular politician, the cabinet minister — and seeing how they fit.