/ 4 March 2005

Mbeki: End of NNP will send powerful message

The dissolution of the former ruling apartheid New National Party and its inclusion into the African National Congress will send ”a very powerful message about the extraordinary ability of our people to give real meaning to the goals of national reconciliation”, says President Thabo Mbeki.

In his regular internet column, ANC Today, the president noted on Friday that the former apartheid ruling party’s federal executive has decided to recommend this week to its federal congress — to be held on April 9 — that the party should disband on the day of the final certification of the results of the next local government elections, scheduled for late in 2005 or early 2006.

Mbeki noted that following this decision, the NNP — formerly the National Party (NP) — secretary general Daryl Swanepoel said: ”The NNP is of the firm conviction that the best way to secure a united South Africa is to ensure inclusivity in decision-making and to achieve this … it is crucial for black, white, coloured and Indian to join forces with the African National Congress.”

The NP ruled South African from 1948 to the end of the pre-democratic era in 1994.

Mbeki said should the NNP federal congress accept the recommendation, ”this would mark the end of a once-mighty political organisation that came to represent everything that was fundamentally wrong with the idea and practice of white minority rule” in South Africa.

”At the same time, it would communicate a very powerful message about the extraordinary ability of our people to give real meaning to the goals of national reconciliation, unity in diversity and non-racialism, and a common nationhood.

”It would confirm the gift we share as a people, regardless of race and colour, practically to communicate the message to ourselves and the world, that we are, together, human beings who belong to one common humanity, regardless of our different histories.”

Mbeki said: ”Fundamentally, the eight decades of struggle between the ANC and the NP [formed in 1912 and 1914 respectively] resulted in the victory of non-racialism and democracy, and the creation of the conditions for the cooperation of the constituencies represented by these two political formations, to build a peaceful, non-racial, non-sexist, united and prosperous democracy.”

Mbeki said that during the course of the liberal struggle against apartheid, ”certainly in the period from 1948, when the NP took power and began to introduce the system of apartheid, to 1990, when the formal negotiations between the ANC and the NP began, one of the strategic goals we pursued was the weakening and the defeat of the NP and the apartheid government it formed”.

The NP pursued the same goal with regard to the ANC ”and the rest of the democratic movement. As a result of this, during the period of apartheid rule, the national liberation movement experienced the most intense repression, which, among other things, claimed many lives, and for some time severely weakened our movement.

”But in the end, the brutal offensive failed. The ANC survived and grew from strength to strength, as did the struggle against the NP apartheid regime, for the liberation of the black oppressed. By the end of the 1980s, 75 years after it was formed, the NP saw that it had no choice but to negotiate with the same ANC it had sought to destroy.”

The NNP, after being reduced from nearly 7% of the vote in 1999, received less than 2% of the vote in the 2004 national election. It opted to allow its members to have dual membership with the ANC — and its public representatives began to fall under the discipline of the ANC. — I-Net Bridge