Former president PW Botha ought to be remembered for the fact that during his time as head of state, he saw the need for change ”even though his approach to this change was in itself controversial”, says African National Congress (ANC) deputy leader Jacob Zuma.
In a statement released by ANC spokesperson Steyn Speed on Friday, Zuma said: ”It was with sadness that I learnt of the death of the former state president PW Botha. As I am abroad, I am unable to personally convey my condolences to the Botha family.”
Botha died at his home at Wilderness in the Western Cape on Tuesday.
Zuma said Botha ”will be one of those South Africans who will always be remembered given the role he played in our history during his time as head of state. He presided over a period when our country was besieged with conflict and bloodshed.”
But when he became convinced of the need for change, ”he made a telling statement to his party and to his followers when he said they should ‘adapt or die”’, reported Zuma.
This sentiment echoed an earlier statement from President Thabo Mbeki indicating that Botha had secretly sanctioned the first meetings with the ANC — before the reform actions of his successor, FW de Klerk, became obvious.
Zuma said that by indicating the need for change ”he was informing them that they [the Afrikaners] had to choose between adapting to the inevitable political change or to perish with the system of apartheid which saw South Africa totally isolated from the rest of the world and being fought by every sector of society internally”.
This brave statement was not an easy one to make in the then ruling National Party and was not well received by the party faithful at the time, noted Zuma.
”It should also be remembered that before FW de Klerk became involved in the process, which led to negotiations with the ANC, it was PW Botha who sent the first emissary to meet with the ANC representative to probe the possibility of some form of negotiations. He did this without the majority of his colleagues knowing of this action.”
This was a clear reference to Broederbond chief Piet de Lange meeting Mbeki in New York in 1986.
Zuma added that it was also Botha who allowed his then justice minister, Kobie Coetzee, to open dialogue during the mid-Eighties with former president Nelson Mandela while he was still in prison.
”It is important for all of us to know this and remember PW Botha as a man who, while being very tough in his management of apartheid, was also capable of acknowledging the realities that were fundamental challenges to the life of our country, South Africa.
”I would like to convey my heartfelt condolences to the Botha family by remembering some of these aspects about the man who led the party and the government which my organisation fought at the time. But this was also a man who, during the last days of his rule, began to see the need for change and dialogue.”
Zuma said: ”I make this statement as one of the ANC members who was involved in the very early beginnings of negotiations between the National Party government and the ANC.”
”May he rest in peace,” he said.
Botha’s partner in peace
President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday that Botha, who started apartheid’s ”liquidation”, and former ANC leader Oliver Tambo were partners in bringing peace to South Africa, though, tragically, they never met.
Writing in his weekly newsletter on the ANC’s website, Mbeki said the Botha government’s legislative reforms from 1986 began to dismantle the Afrikaner’s ”protective apartheid wall”, constructed in the mistaken belief it would ensure their very survival as a people.
Both Tambo and Botha had authorised the series of confidential conversations between the ANC and prominent Afrikaners in the late 1980s that led directly to the first formal, though still secret, negotiations between the ANC leadership in exile and the Botha government in 1989.
”In 1989 PW Botha, the ultimate guardian of the keys of the apartheid jails, opened the prison gates to allow his most prominent prisoner [Mandela] to come to Tuynhuys, the very seat of apartheid power in Cape Town,” Mbeki said.
Botha did this to initiate a process that would, within a few years, liberate from apartheid bondage Mandela, the majority he represented, and South Africans as a whole.
In the same year, Tambo began a process that led to the adoption by the ANC, its allies and the rest of the South African mass democratic movement, the Southern African front-line states, the Organisation of African Unity, the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations General Assembly of what came to be known as the Harare Declaration.
”The 1989 declaration spelt out what needed to be done by all of us as South Africans, to arrive at a negotiated resolution of the centuries-old conflict in our country, occasioned by the imposition of colonialism and apartheid.
”The declaration also constituted an unequivocal statement by our movement and the rest of the world, that the entirety of the national and international movement for our liberation, united against apartheid, was, as Nelson Mandela had proposed at the July 5 1989 meeting with PW Botha at Tuynhuys, ready to begin conversations with those whom history had defined as our oppressors, to translate into reality, with them, the vision that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
”At the beginning of 1989, Botha suffered a slight stroke that ultimately led to his retirement from active politics, having opened the door to the liquidation of the inhuman system of apartheid to whose construction and defence he had dedicated his life.
”He left the challenging task of the completion of the work he had started to his successor, FW de Klerk.”
Later in 1989, Tambo suffered from a massive stroke that effectively took him out of active politics, and Mandela assumed leadership of the ANC.
”The fates determined that Oliver Tambo, born in 1917, a year later than PW Botha, should leave the world of the living in 1993, a year before the realisation of his lifetime dream of the liberation of all our people.
”The fates decreed that PW Botha should depart the world of the living only a few days ago, 13 years after the death of an outstanding South African and African patriot, and world statesman, Oliver Reginald Tambo.
”Tragically, Oliver Tambo and PW Botha never had the opportunity to meet. But of them we can say, echoing the words of the Palestinian, Yasser Arafat, when he spoke of the Israeli, Yitzhak Rabin, that they were partners in the creation of the peace of the brave that is our blessing, but, again tragically, seems, still, to be beyond the reach of the sister peoples of Palestine and Israel,” Mbeki said. — I-Net Bridge, Sapa