Marion Edmunds
It was a casual weekend — Hernus Kriel was wearing baggy tracksuit pants, Sheila Camerer a light pink slack suit, John Mavuso designer moccasins and FW de Klerk a checked shirt. But behind the informality and bonhomie in Hermanus, the Nats were in deadly earnest.
“Tell me,” said De Klerk, leaning in earnest over crayfish and Dewetshof Chardonnay on Saturday night, “now that you have had this weekend, would you have written any differently, now that you understand?”
Journalists at his table found themselves in a difficult position. There is no such thing as a free lunch, they say, nor a free candle-lit dinner in Hermanus’s swishest restaurant.
The weekend was useful: policy positions were re-articulated, De Klerk’s vision was explained again, and it was possible to mingle with National Party politicians, many of them former Cabinet ministers of the apartheid government, and talk loosely about the party’s future. But there was nothing new — no face-lift to write about, nothing to change the perspective that the Nats are in trouble.
An all-day briefing even provided an opportunity for open derision. When Minister of Tourism Dawie de Villiers used his time on Saturday afternoon to speak in detail about Hermanus’s chief tourist attraction, whales, a journalist piped up that his hotel was full of frustrated tourists who had not been able to spot whales, and perhaps the Nats should send their lost black Cabinet minister, Abe Williams, floating down the coast on his back, blowing bubbles, to do his bit for tourism.
In the face of uproarious laughter, De Villiers and the other party members on the panel squirmed in embarrassment. It was not the only mocking comment. The media are learning to be openly irreverent about the NP.
And it is this tide of irreverence that the Nats are trying to turn back, with a strategy that swings from defence to seduction and then back to defence. They see the media as gatekeepers to a new black electorate, which they have to seduce in order to survive.
That weekend the Nats invested in the future and threw money at the media to woo them. It was expertly organised, including two nights at Hermanus hotels with views of the sea, a welcoming party and open bar on Friday night, a sea-food dinner, a personalised zip-up faux leather folder for all journalists, and as an afdenking geskenkie, a bottle of red wine, with an NP label plastered on it.
While journalists clearly enjoyed themselves, these offerings did not sway minds. A black journalist, who preferred not to be named, said: “During dinner, I was watching some of the Nats listen to some SABC colleagues’ homeland anecdotes. The MPs avoided eye contact with the storyteller and maintained eye contact among themselves in a patronising way that said: ‘Jislaaik, these black ouens are really good when it comes to telling stories.’ About the content of the tales, there seemed to be little of the clearly required embarrassment.
“The weekend was something of a ‘black box’ exercise: it provided really good background on why Nats are heading for the rocks.”
The worst thing De Klerk did, it appears, was boast about his new black Cabinet minister. In defence of his attitude towards affirmative action, he pointed to Mavuso and said: “Mavuso is a black man … but he is a competent black.” Mavuso, though, was not given the floor once to talk about his history, about his attitudes to the NP, or to defend himself against criticism that he is a political party-hopping hack.
SABC journalist Manelisi Dubase said De Klerk’s statement was insulting to the black community: “It goes down to saying that blacks are generally incompetent,”