Roelf Meyer, newly appointed secretary general of the NP, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
DRIVING to Pretoria to meet the New Face of the National Party on Monday morning, I heard FW de Klerk giving an interview about his party’s new direction on SAfm’s AM Live show. He affably said how happy he was to be back on Radio Today once more.
Unlike De Klerk who sometimes seems still to have his Yesterdays and Todays a bit muddled, whose frownlines habitually betray an irritability lurking behind the forced bonhomie the National Party’s new secretary general is blessed with a deceptive gee-golly-shucks countenance. A vision of perpetual youth that makes him seem like he is in permanent awe of the democratic miracle he has helped fashion: Roelfie in Wonderland. History literally slides off his features. Age cannot wither him, nor the National Party’s history stale his infinite variety.
And that, says one senior National Party tactician, is one of the major reasons why he has been made custodian of the party’s future. Why he was given the job of expanding the party beyond an Afrikaner special interest lobby. Man, he looks good! He’s the media’s blue-eyed boy. A good, honest-looking boereseun. Even if he has enemies within the party, outside he can make no mistake. He’s a bit like Nelson Mandela. He doesn’t even have a good pronunciation of English!
True enough, Meyer’s English fluent but heavily accented connotes wide-eyed farmboy rather than repressive military patriarch. He struggles tremulously for the right accent rather than blustering, Vorster-style, his way through a pronunciation slip. But Roelf Meyer is no ingenue Alice drinking bottles of growing potion (or youth elixir) he happens to find strewn in his path. He is the teller of his own story, he places the bottles there himself, he is one of the sharpest and subtlest operators on the South African political scene. He has apparently always known that his Cabinet influence would wane once the constitution was written, and has long been angling for a new platform.
Certainly, by dropping him from the Cabinet and giving him the nigh-impossible task of bringing black people to the party, De Klerk may be consigning him as Stoffel van der Merwe was previously to oblivion. But the opinion of Beeld’s Tim du Plessis is far more likely: De Klerk’s order in 1992 to Mr Meyer was: Just negotiate, and I’ll bring the NP along.’ Four years later, Mr De Klerk is speaking in almost the same vein to him: Do what you need to to the NP, and I’ll protect you.’ Which Mr Meyer will certainly need.
Roelf Meyer is one of the most likeable personalities you will ever meet. But although he is affable and informal, he remains enigmatic. Unlike Pik Botha or Leon Wessels over-emotional repudiators of the past he offers no articulation of his transformation. And always conventional and never a rebel, he has never considered the option of dissent, in the way a Breytenbach or a Fischer or even a Slabbert or Wynand Malan did. Now close to 50, he is still, ultimately, the good boereseun. Although he comes from a very ordinary farming family that was on the margins of Afrikaans society (his father seldom went to church, and was not politically involved), he has built his own profile through an almost-textbook rise through Afrikaans institutions: the church, the Afrikaner Studentebond, the Rapportryers, the Ruiterwag, the Broederbond, and of course the National Party. He doesn’t swear, he doesn’t drink (much), he doesn’t fool around: he’s too damn straight to leave the NP.
He often talks about how, when he entered Parliament aged 32, in 1979, he was hit by how unreal and unacceptable it was, and how it gave him no satisfaction. He certainly gave no hint of it at the time. Vaderland parliamentary correspondent Dries van Heerden took to calling him klein FW. A decade apart, their political careers followed very similar routes through Afrikaner institutions.
In Parliament Meyer gravitated naturally towards De Klerk and Adriaan Vlok, then Chief Broeder on the benches, firmly in the Transvaal centre-right axis of the party. Like De Klerk, he took care not to trumpet his precocity: he kept his head down, making strategic interventions where they would be noticed. By 1986, he was handpicked from the back benches by PW Botha to be deputy minister of law and order under Vlok. This threw him right into the heart of the Botha-era repression. In February 1987, he told Parliament that the detentions over the past year were worth it’ because it was better to have more freedom for millions of people than to have a few disrupting normal daily life.
He was also appointed chairman of Botha’s Joint Management System, which co-ordinated security forces and service-providers with the aim of eliminating troublemakers through detention and winning the hearts and minds of black people by improving township infrastructures. Meyer who admits now that he was frustrated at the time because he realised a political solution was neccessary says he would be happy to go to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to talk about his time there.
Whatever his involvement in the repressive securocracy, one thing is certain: he is more comfortable in the new, ANC-led South Africa than any of his party colleagues. He receives frequent plaudits from a (perhaps trouble-making) Nelson Mandela. In 1989, after being appointed deputy minister of constitutional development, he announced publicly that he would resign if there was no move towards change within two years. That vow, he says now, drove me. After Codesa collapsed in 1992, he became minister and the government’s chief negotiator, after a brief and unhappy stint as minister of defence, when he was known by the generals as The Canary because his only prior experience in defence had been as a choirboy at the Air Force Gymnasium in the late 1960s.
As chief negotiator, Meyer surprised all of us, says one journalist close to the NP: He seemed to develop both personally and politically at Kempton Park. His first move was jettisoning the Inkatha Freedom Party, the darling of most of his colleagues. Suddenly the good little prefect found himself having terrible fights with the teachers, with powerful people like Hernus Kriel, Tertius Delport, Kobie Coetzee and Rina Venter, all of whom regularly accused him of selling the party and white folk out. He had to defend himself, because he knew he was right. Unlike them, he understood that you could not outmanoeuvre the ANC, and that conceding certain points was the only way forward. And so, says the journalist, He developed a self-confidence, a toughness. He fought back.
Even now, he is loathed by people like Kriel whom he further antagonised by his technically correct support of Mandela’s stand during the Cape Town demarcation dispute last year. Once more, the hawks in the party accused him of betrayal and of ANC lackeyism. His supporters counter by explaining that his very pragmatism is the reason why the National Party has any influence at all. And true enough, the famed Roelf-Cyril channel that kept negotiations going during the desperate days following the Boipatong massacre in 1992 brought South Africa back from the brink of civil war. Meyer to his immense credit was often more interested in saving the situation than in fighting for party interests.
Perhaps De Klerk gave Meyer the job of secretary general to make Meyer accountable to him and no longer to Mandela, and to tie his only really viable successor more directly to the party’s fortunes. Now, perhaps, what distinguishes Roelf Meyer from his colleagues is the understanding that the NP cannot win black support through an offensive on the ANC. He understands, says one senior ANC leader who knows him well, that if you say, the ANC doesn’t deliver!’, it sounds like you’re saying blacks can’t do the job’; that these attacks translate, in the minds of black people, into racist attacks from people bitter about losing power.
While people like Hernus Kriel and Pieter Marais go out of their way to set up the ANC as the communist Anti-Christ, Roelf Meyer goes out of his way to emphasise the fact that there’s very little separating the two at all. The overall objectives of the NP and the ANC, he says, are very much the same, because we both want to uplift people and ensure we close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
He speaks like a social democrat rather than a Christian democrat conservative. Unlike even De Klerk, he will not push a conservative moral agenda around bringing back the death penalty and outlawing abortion. His approach seems to be to woo people from their traditional support of the ANC, not by emphasising difference, but rather by saying, Hey, we’re just like the ANC! Why black people would vote for a De Klerk-led ANC rather than a Mandela- or Mbeki-led ANC is beyond me: perhaps the Meyer approach is the only one, but it seems more like a political cul-de-sac than a route to future power.
During most of the battles between Meyer and the NP hawks last year, De Klerk stayed on the fence. This, according to insiders, caused more than a little tension between the NP leader and his new crown prince. It seems more than likely that Meyer extracted from De Klerk a commitment to his vision for the future before accepting the job. De Klerk, for his part, must have extracted a commitment from Meyer that he would be prepared to work as an opposition leader rather than as a member of the executive. It remains to be seen whose definition of opposition prevails.
The wisdom of De Klerk in appointing a conciliator rather than a combatant as party organiser, also remains to be seen. It surely goes against the grain of the combative and restive Nat ranks. In our interview he acknowledged that the NP rebirth before the 1994 elections was a dismal failure: There is still the perception that the NP is a white party, because its leadership is white. Certainly, that kind of thing will have to change.
Is Danie Schutte’s blood boiling yet? Has Hernus had a hernia? Wait for this: We have to become sensitive to the aspirations and needs of black people. Traditional supporters of the NP are interested in things like the preservation of Afrikaans which are obviously not in the minds of black people … As long as this prevails, people in the black community will have difficulty with the NP. Understandably so.
The hawks can rest easy, though. This is not the thin edge of the wedge. Meyer remains a strong advocate of the National Party’s interests. In a closed bilateral between the ANC and the NP at the World Trade Centre on Monday, for example, he led the NP’s campaign to extend the Government of National Unity beyond 1999. Cyril Ramaphosa rejected this out of hand. Now, Meyer says, Frankly, it might be difficult for us to find each other on this, but I’m still looking for a solution. I have something in the back of my mind that I’m sure will get us through this …
Waves of nostalgia: fly-hooked fingers, late-night sessions, taking to the dance floor together. It sounds like the Roelf-Cyril channel all over again. With one significant difference: the ANC no longer needs the channel. It is in power. It will get its way. The extent to which Roelf Meyer understands this will determine his political longevity.