Former president FW de Klerk has rejected suggestions that African National Congress negotiators outmanoeuvred his team in the talks that led to the 1994 elections.
Writing in the daily newspaper Die Burger on Thursday, he said it was clear that the ANC had been forced to make ”fundamental and painful” concessions, concessions which were still being criticised from within its power base.
”The ANC for example originally wanted a unitary socialist state, with nationalisation of mines and banks among other things, in accordance with the guidelines of its Freedom Charter.
”And anyone who thinks that the ANC was originally a proponent of the comprehensive restrictions on the abuse of power contained in the Constitution, is living in a dream world.”
De Klerk was reacting to an article in the newspaper by deputy editor Leopold Scholz, who said the former president erred by making the ”hopelessly naive” Roelf Meyer the National Party’s chief negotiator, and that the ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa and Joe Slovo ”ran rings around him and his little team”.
The NP, Scholz suggested, would have done better to have put a more experienced negotiator such as then foreign affairs minister Pik Botha in the hot seat.
De Klerk said that in the end the NP achieved most of the primary goals it had set for itself, and that it was not true that the talks had been left in the hands of inexperienced individuals.
”The broad leadership corps of the NP was continually intimately involved in the negotiations,” he said.
Botha had in fact played a very important role in the talks, and had been ”a member of my negotiating team at key moments when we stood at crossroads”.
He had great appreciation of Meyer’s role and the value of the relationships of trust Meyer built up with key figures in the ANC.
”The fact remains that ten years after our first democratic elections, the new South Africa, with all its faults, is a much better place than the South Africa of the past, and immeasurably better than the South Africa we would have had if we had not begun the process of change in 1990,” he said.
He said it was very easy ten years on to criticise the new dispensation for this or that shortcoming.
”It is completely another matter to take decisions — without prophetic gifts and confronted with a shifting power balance and the necessity to give and take — which are to the best advantage of your country and people during a dynamic negotiating process.
”The alternative to a reasonably balanced settlement was, in the words of former president John Vorster, too ghastly to contemplate.” – Sapa