Former state president PW Botha, who turns 90 on Thursday, will spend the day with friends and family, his eldest daughter, Elanza Maritz, said on Wednesday.
”I think he’s looking forward to it,” she said. ”It is a special birthday.”
There will be ”coming and going” all day at Die Anker, Botha’s riverside home at Wilderness in the Southern Cape, and a light supper and more celebrations in the evening at her home in nearby George.
She said most of her brothers and sisters — she has two of each — and their children will be there for the day.
Though Botha loves cake, there are no plans for a particularly special cake.
”Being with him is the main thing, not the eating and drinking,” she said.
Botha was born on January 12 1916 on the farm Telegraaf near Paul Roux in the then Orange Free State.
He was elected MP for George in the landslide 1948 election that brought the National Party (NP) to power, and held that seat until 1984: 36 years during which — as a ”good constituency man” — he promoted the town’s development ceaselessly.
His first Cabinet post came in 1961 when prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd appointed him minister in the portfolio of community development and coloured affairs.
His department oversaw the destruction of District Six and the displacement of its people to the Cape Flats.
In 1966, he became Verwoerd’s defence minister — in which capacity he was to play a major role in overseeing South Africa’s war in Namibia and Angola — and in the same year was elected as the NP’s Cape leader.
In 1978, in the fallout from the scandal over the state funding of The Citizen newspaper, he outflanked his rivals to become prime minister.
Botha remained in the post for six years, during which time he tinkered with apartheid, bringing in a new constitutional dispensation that elevated him to executive state president and enfranchised coloureds and Indians in their own separate and unequal parliaments.
However he did little, beyond scrapping the hated pass book, to better the position of black people, and in the notorious Rubicon speech incident backed away from meaningful reform.
It was Botha, known to opponents as ”the big crocodile”, who coined the phrases ”total onslaught” and ”total strategy” to justify the ever-greater use of force to suppress growing black resistance to whites-only rule.
He suffered a light stroke in January 1989, was elbowed out of his post by FW de Klerk later that year and retired to live in relative obscurity in Die Anker.
The coming of democracy, in 1994, did briefly give him trouble, in the shape of Archbishop Desmond Tutu — an old foe — and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Botha took a dim view of the body, famously calling it a ”circus”.
He was convicted in 1998, at age 82, of holding the commission in contempt and was fined, but successfully appealed both conviction and sentence. — Sapa