Author and academic Hermann Giliomee says he believes that former South African president FW de Klerk was outfoxed by events leading up to democratic changes in South Africa.
Speaking to the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday, the author of The Afrikaners, Biography of a People Giliomee said if former President PW Botha — whom he had personally named “Die Groot Krokodil” [the Big Crocodile] had remained in power, it was likely that the Afrikaner-led apartheid administration would have clung on to power.
The history professor at the University of Stellenbosch said: “If PW had stayed on the whole transition would have taken place 10 years later.”
While crediting De Klerk with “handing over power gracefully” to the first non-racial black majority government in the hands of the African National Congress (ANC) administration in 1994, he said problems had arisen because he was “so adulated by his own [then ruling National Party parliamentary] caucus”.
Giliomee suggested this had been politically dangerous and he believed De Klerk had never had a game plan in place after his February 2 1990 speech when he unbanned the African National Congress and other liberation movements. He said history was littered with examples of people being “outfoxed and outwitted” by events.
Giliomee said he had interviewed De Klerk in May 1990 and asked him why he had chosen that route. “You don’t have to do this,” the academic reported that he had said to De Klerk. “He was taken aback and said but what is the alternative… I said I had come back after three months in Jerusalem … there was one policy and one imposition.”
The academic, who worked as an adviser to the New National Party in the last election in 1999, suggested at the time he could impose the full might of the resources of the state. “He [FW] asked what about the morality and I said ‘what about the morality when apartheid was at its height’.”
While the academic acknowledged that the alternative of handing over power was “muddling through” [with apartheid], De Klerk had not put in place an alternative ideological position to fall back on for the Afrikaner minority. “His ideology had totally collapsed.”
The academic said when De Klerk said in May 1990 that the ANC’s demand for a constituent assembly would “have to be reconsidered”, he came under tremendous pressure from Western powers.
Giliomee suggested that De Klerk should have first put bottom lines for negotiating with the black majority to Britain and the United States. The political debate thereafter was how “to crown” the ANC. – I-Net Bridge