OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Friday
GENERAL Constand Viljoen, the leader of South Africa’s rightwing Freedom Front and the champion of self-rule for the white Afrikaner minority, is leaving politics in frustration at the way the ruling party dominates politics.
In a brief address to parliament this week, Viljoen complained that South Africa’s democracy resembled a Westminister system and that this sidelined minority parties, giving them too little influence and speaking-time in parliament.
Viljoen said President Thabo Mbeki’s African National Congress (ANC) might feel comfortable about a majority being in a position to “bulldoze views on nation-building”, but this was not a wise approach.
He said it meant that the black majority and the white Afrikaners who had ruled under apartheid had missed the chance to build bridges.
“We together have missed an opportunity between two important communities,” he added.
“The larger the majority, the more humble they should be,” Viljoen said, in a broadside to the ANC.
Viljoen, a long-serving commander of the apartheid army, has led the Freedom Front since its formation on the eve of South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994.
The party has pursued self-determination for Afrikaners, but achieved little success in that regard or at the polls.
In the general elections of 1999, his party’s percentage of the national vote slipped to 0.8% from the 2.2% it had won five years earlier in the historic first all-race elections.
This slide in support indicated that Viljoen’s party could not rally Afrikaners behind the idea of self-determination, an ideal which the general himself in 1998 admitted was still too closely associated with apartheid.
But the general, a 67-year-old part-time cattle farmer, won the respect of many of his peers who appreciated his openness to debate and his belief in constructive opposition to the government.
Nelson Mandela famously described him as “a man of integrity” if not, the former president said, an astute politician.
Viljoen said he would lay down the leadership of the Freedom Front at the end of March and leave parliament at the end of April. He was given a standing ovation by fellow MPs. – AFP