In his testimony to the Tebbutt Commission, Mangope laid blame on everyone but himself for the violence that engulfed Bophuthatswana in the last days of his regime, reports Stefaans Brmmer
IN the old Bophuthatswana, the buck stopped a few desks short of Lucas Mangope’s. If it reached the top, it was handed back down again.
Testifying before the Tebbutt Commission, the deposed homeland president took no blame for the violence that engulfed Bophuthatswana in the last days of his rule, weeks before South Africa’s first democratic elections. The African National Congress was to blame, the National Party government was to blame – even his own civil servants and security chiefs were to blame.
The former ruler’s face was grave and drawn, his eyelids as leaden as they had been during his worst days in power. As he neared the end of his testimony, commission chair Judge Pat Tebbutt reminded him that, in fact, “the buck stops right at the top”. The judge thanked him for his “frank” contribution.
Tebbutt grilled Mangope for hours, repeating questions three, four times when he gave no direct reply. The irony could not have escaped the former president. The commission, appointed by President Nelson Mandela to probe the Bophuthatswana unrest of March 11 1994, conducted its session in the old Bophuthatswana legislative chamber in Mmabatho. The seat of Mangope’s power had become the domain of his inquisitor.
Not that Mangope was taking it lying down. He denied he had invited Eugene Terre’Blanche’s ragtag army of Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) farmers – widely believed to have been a catalyst for the outbreak of violence – to help prop up his ailing regime. “I would not even think of touching the AWB with a bargepole,” he said.
Asked why he had called Constand Viljoen’s Afrikaner Volksfront, he said: “He was the only one available … I don’t think I could have turned to the Democratic Party and said, `Can you guard my installations?'”
Accusing the ANC and the NP of “a measure of dishonesty” in their dealings with him, Mangope blamed his troubles on a “three- phased” ANC plan to render the homeland “ungovernable” in the early Nineties. He claimed intelligence reports verified this, and that a later report also warned that 6000 Umkhonto weSizwe troops were ready to invade the homeland in the “final phase” during March 1994.
He said he questioned the ANC’s tactics to an ANC delegation, which included Mandela, in February 1992. Mandela, he said, promised it would be stopped. “But the policy continued until the fall of my government,” he said.
Another ingredient in the Mangope conspiracy theory: after the “record of understanding” in October 1993 between the ANC and the NP, the South African government withheld installments on the R2,5-billion-a-year payments it should have made to Bophuthatswana in terms of the Southern African Customs Union agreement. “They turned their backs on all of us who had worked with them for a truly federalist dispensation.”
Which explained, Mangope argued, why in March 1994, he had decided not to call in the South African Defence Force, as he had done during the 1988 coup attempt against him. Instead he called the Volksfront to help “stabilise” the homeland. There had been reports that the communist party’s Joe Slovo, then on the Transitional Executive Council, had threatened to “send in SADF tanks” to topple his government if he did not rejoin South Africa, he said.
Tebbutt put it to Mangope that there was evidence that ordinary Bophuthatswanan soldiers and police members had felt the presence of “white khaki-clad” Volksfront members was “probably a rightwing invasion”, which contributed to the violence.
The Bophuthatswana police chief at the time, PJ Seleke, had told the commission that even he was unaware the rightwingers were on their way.
Mangope’s response: “I did what I saw as my duty, to inform the [Bophuthatswana National] Security Council . If [Seleke] did not attend, it was not my duty to inform him.”
Reminded that he himself had caused unrest when he ordered his security forces to break up protests by civil servants, he said, “The civil service wanted increases and pensions while they were not even at work.”
He even turned on his own defence chief, Jack Turner, saying that he had lied when he testified that Mangope had berated his officer corps for being “disloyal”.
Poignant, perhaps, was Mangope’s description of the visit by Pik Botha, the ANC’s Mac Maharaj, then co-chair of the Transitional Executive Council, SADF chief General Georg Meiring and others on March 12, when Botha told him his rule was over. “They came to tell me I would no longer be the president of Bophuthatswana . I told them they did not have the constitutional right,” he said.
A day later, he was put under house arrest, at his country retreat near Zeerust, surrounded by “thousands” of SADF troops.
That his dethronement may have been illegal can hardly be disputed – even Tebbutt acknowledged as much. But Mangope’s powerlessness, and his myopic reading of the writing on the wall, suggests there was no other way. The ex-president could have been talking about his own incapacitation in this description of his house arrest: “When I had to answer the call of nature I was accompanied by armed men to the toilet.”