The election has rescued three apartheid dinosaurs from political extinction, write Mungo Soggot and Evidence wa ka Ngobeni
South Africa’s answer to Ross Perot, Louis Luyt, is heading for Parliament as the sole voice of his fledgling Federal Alliance party. On Thursday night it appeared Luyt would be the only representative from his party who will start commuting between its Ellis Park headquarters in Johannesburg and the National Assembly in Cape Town. At a push he might be joined by the New National Party defector, Kraai van Niekerk.
If the former fertiliser king’s closest advisers are to be believed, Luyt’s Achilles heel in Parliament will be his inability to lie – not his track record as one of South Africa’s most controversial businessmen, his bad temper and his fondness for the politically incorrect.
Luyt’s right-hand man, former National Party MP Brigadier General Kobus Bosman, said of the rugby supremo: ”Dr Luyt has one bad political weakness and that is that he cannot tell a lie. The fact is that Dr Luyt is one of the most honest people I’ve met.”
Bosman, who himself was banking on a seat in the Gauteng legislature, said of the party’s dismal performance, ”Of course we are disappointed,” but he sought solace in the fact Luyt will now be on the opposition benches.
”He’s got such a personality, he’s always a winner. We did not really win here,” he said, gesturing around the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) counting hall, ”but we didn’t lose. I think we have planted a seed.”
Bosman was scathing about the other opposition parties’ failure to join hands, reserving most of his contempt for the NNP, which he quit in February. Bosman said the NNP’s Gauteng leader, Johann Killian, had passed him in the IEC headquarters in Pretoria and said: ”You and Mr Luyt have succeeded in fucking up the NP.”
”My reply to him was that he had done a better job.”
Bosman said of the other opposition parties: ”They have been fishing in the same old fishing pool, while the ocean was out there ready to be taken.”
Bosman declined to disclose how much money Luyt had spent on his campaign, but party officials have privately estimated R12- million.
Although Luyt has dubbed himself a liberal, he has thrown his weight behind the death penalty, chain gangs and the creation of a Christian state. However, he has mocked the idea of a volkstaat, and likes to remind critics that he flouted the ban on the African National Congress in 1988 by talking to the liberation movement about the possible desegregation of rugby.
After succeeding in the fertiliser business, Luyt founded Luyt Breweries in 1971, bagging 16% of the market in one year. Since the mid-1980s, however, he has concentrated on developing his stranglehold on South African rugby.
The former Bophuthatswana homeland president and the leader of the United Christian Democratic Party (UCDP), Lucas Mangope, is also going to the National Assembly.
Mangope, making a new appearance on the political scene since his regime was destroyed by angry youths in 1993, proved that you can’t keep a good (or bad) man down, when his party won votes in the North-West province.
Last week he was cleared of fraud and corruption charges involving millions of rands.
The UCDP is now the official opposition to the ANC in the North-West.
>From the thorn-tree-covered valleys of Lobatsi, to Koster outside Rustenburg and Mmabatho, Mangope was a crowd-puller in the run-up to the elections.
Last Saturday, he joined a church congregation at Mmabatho stadium to pray for victory.
However, on Wednesday Mangope drew little attention from rural voters during his tour around the province’s polling stations.
He cast his vote in the tribal office of his home village of Motswedi, outside Zeerust, arriving in his Volkswagen Golf with his wife Leah. There were no cheers or vivas.
Even his brother, who is the chief of the Motswedi, left before his older brother arrived.
However, Chief AM Mangope said his people ”naturally” voted for the UCDP.
After casting his vote, Mangope stood alone, waiting for his bodyguards to arrive to start his tour of polling stations. He displayed little charisma on the tour. At Zeerust, he walked past a queue of voters and into the polling station without attempting to speak to a single person. A white woman wished him luck as she passed him to make her mark inside the hall.
Party insiders say Mangope was aware that in order to perform well at the polls he had to overcome the deep distrust most voters had for him in 1994.
”He has a good chance of winning this election here and governing well compared to what the ANC did,” said a matric student, who voted for the first time on Wednesday.
Another student, who took part in the destruction of Mangope’s regime and is now a loyal member of the UCDP, said he chose the party because the ANC did nothing for him.
”People say Mangope’s support base is limited to elderly people around here, but that is not true. He has been gaining a lot of support lately,” he said.
A Motswedi woman recalled the benefits Mangope had brought to the former Bophuthatswana. He had built roads and schools, she said.
As Joe Serote, who was prevented by his mother from participating in the 1993 coup, said: ”Things are different now – Mangope may take the province once again because people who had jobs lost them when the ANC took over.”
Meanwhile, the leader of the Minority Front, Amichand Rajbansi, will take a seat in the National Assembly after collecting enough votes from the KwaZulu-Natal Indian community, the constituency he served as an MEC in the provincial legislature.
Rajbansi formerly served in the House of Delegates, the Indian house of the discredited apartheid-era Tricameral Parliament.