OWN CORRESPONDENT, Lagos | Monday
SOUTH Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to uncover the truth about black-on-black violence, the last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, has told a Nigerian newspaper.
Nigeria last year set up a commission to investigate human rights abuses dating back to 1966. Chaired by former Supreme Court Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, the panel has been holding public hearings in Abuja and Lagos since October.
Speaking to the newspaper The Guardian, De Klerk said the idea of a commission to probe rights abuses was good in principle, but badly executed in South Africa.
“Let me say that among the good things we have achieved with our own commission, it was healthy to get the truth disclosed, for the families of people who had disappeared to at least find out what had happened to their relatives,” the Nobel peace prize winner said.
“The mistakes which we made I think were that our commission was not correctly composed. It did not have members who had real insight into the government side of the conflict,” he said.
“In that sense, right from the beginning, it had to work under the cloud of suspicion that it was biased and basically an African National Congress supporting commission,” he said.
“This affected its credibility and I must say it also affected the effectiveness of its outcome … It covered very well wrongdoings from the side of the security forces (but) it did not really effectively uncover the truth with regard to black on black violence,” he said.
De Klerk set out a number of problems he said the current ANC government had failed to tackle.
South Africa, he said, “has big problems – a very high crime rate, very high unemployment rate, not enough economic growth, too much corruption for my liking.”
He also criticised “a few actions I support but that are done in a way that it becomes a new form of racial discrimination.”
“We can solve these problems. We have the foundations on which we can solve these problems,” he said.
In the same interview, De Klerk said he thought current president Thabo Mbeki was “ill-advised” and had “made a mistake” in comments questioning the link between HIV and Aids.
De Klerk was in Nigeria to deliver a lecture on child development. – AFP
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