The media love a soft target. And Marthinus van Schalkwyk has been the perfect repository for all manner of ridicule and vitriol in the past two weeks. Much of the commentary has been as asinine as it has been predictable. Yes, he’s cut a deal that works out rather well for himself — Cabinet position and all. Yes, he’s effectively ended the life of the party he leads — hardly the orthodox objective of political leadership. But look at the big picture.
The standard analysis is that he’s been outwitted by the African National Congress; seduced by the Cabinet position, dewy-eyed at the quicksilver tongues of Messrs Thabo Mbeki and Mosiuoa Lekota, the political damsel has then been date-raped and his party pillaged.
I take a different view. Van Schalkwyk’s approach has been rational and reasonable, and cunningly constructed. While it may not have been an explicit goal originally, I believe that the trajectory, the end of which the New National Party now approaches, was carefully set soon after he succeeded FW de Klerk.
At that point, it was obvious that the future of the NNP was bleak. No amount of reinvention or repackaging would save it. The most it could hope for was that it would retreat into a working-class coloured conclave in the Cape and make a last stand. Heroic, to a point. But hardly enough to entice a young, ambitious politician like Van Schalkwyk.
In the past week he has been accused of selling out not just a party but an ideology, though precisely what that ideology is no one has been able to say. This, too, was part of what Van Schalkwyk realised when he took over his inheritance. By then the NNP stood for nothing — or at least nothing that was significantly different from the ANC.
Ironically, Roelf Meyer had said exactly this in 1996 — I think he used the phrase ”there is virtually nothing between us and the ANC in terms of policy and ideology” — and had spent a miserable last few months in the National Party, battered by the remaining conservatives who resented his role in the transition and his ease with the new dispensation.
I say ”ironically”, because Meyer is regarded as the great strategist. But, had he been a bit younger, and a little less tired from events and his own party, Meyer might have been able to keep his thoughts to himself for long enough to have taken over the leadership. Instead, he was forced out, was deputy leader to Bantu Holomisa for a couple of rather lacklustre years, and then retired from politics.
The irony is that there is little doubt that Van Schalkwyk, very different though he is, had precisely the same strategic instincts about the NP and its future. He manufactured a way of staying and delivering.
My point is that it takes a certain degree of courage and wisdom to set out to lead your party into oblivion. Van Schalkwyk is far less uncharismatic than the satire would indicate. His speech to the national assembly after the NP left its painfully ill-considered embrace with the Democratic Party was perhaps the most dazzling piece of oratory of the last Parliament, a brilliantly incisive attack on Tony Leon that had the ANC benches in an uproar of approval.
He is also technically excellent, in the sense that he knows how to craft a political position and get from A to Z in pursuit of it. I suspect that Mbeki admires him for this.
Together they have brought an end to the party that implemented apartheid. And in just 10 years, with such a smooth and elegantly designed demise. That deserves acclaim, not brickbats.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, and the latest legislative horror show from Zimbabwe. The draft NGO Bill needs to be taken very seriously indeed. In essence, it will prevent any NGO that receives foreign funding for governance or human rights work from registering as an NGO. Anyone who takes part in the operation or management of an NGO that is not registered can be imprisoned for three months. Thus, it could effectively end or at least curtail the work of most human rights or governance organisations.
Second, it will preclude any foreign NGO from registering and, therefore, operating in Zimbabwe. President Robert Mugabe is pulling up the drawbridge ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections. Unless registered or invited by him, no foreign NGO will be able to work in Zimbabwe in the run-up to, or during, the election itself. The consequences are obvious.
There will be some who think it cool and sophisticated to argue that this represents modern, post-colonial thinking; why should we permit foreign entities to interfere with our domestic politics, they will argue? It is the same sort of thinking that informed the ANC Youth League document on Zimbabwe, originally circulated in 2003. It has raised its head earlier this week, when Zimbabwe activists suggested, wrongly it seems, that it was going to be tabled at the ANC Youth League conference that began on Wednesday.
Entitled Much Ado About Zimbabwe, the document reads like a perfectly judged piece of political satire. It reads as if the author was trying to ingratiatingly mimic Mbeki’s style and argument. The document goes on to present tired arguments about the hypocrisy of the West, and fails to understand that one can be against both the clumsy imperialism of Tony Blair in Iraq and the human rights abuses of Mugabe. The two are not mutually exclusive; just because the former has done so much to harm the cause of liberal interventionism does not mean we cannot justifiably argue for solidarity and intervention in the case of Zimbabwe.
It was suggested at the time that the author of the youth-league document was outgoing-ANC Youth League president Malusi Gigaba. But I cannot believe that to be the case; I cannot believe that the president would have promoted to his government the author of such an irksome piece of mediocrity.
Presumably the youth league has developed a more nuanced understanding of the plight of Zimbabweans and will now be willing to accept that just as the South Africans needed the assistance of the outside world during the days of apartheid, so too do Zimbabweans now. Taking a stand against the proposed NGO Bill, strikingly similar to the one the apartheid government introduced for probably identical reasons in the mid-1980s, would be a good, and principled, start and would help inspire confidence in the future leadership of the ANC.