The church handyman who is going to bury PW Botha says he has no reason to think ill of the former state president.
”As I see it, he was a good person,” Manie Botman (40) said on Wednesday morning at the Dutch Reformed Church at Hoekwil near Wilderness where Botha is to be interred.
Botman was weeding a flower bed close to Botha’s open grave, which is alongside the grave of his first wife, Elize.
”Many people said he was bad, but not that I saw,” Botman said.
He said Botha had often come to the hilltop graveyard with a pair of bodyguards to visit the grave of Elize, who died in 1997.
”They just came, and stood and looked, for maybe half an hour, then they went away,” he said.
”We always kept it neat around the grave.”
Elize’s grave, in the shade of a camphor tree, is marked with a simple polished granite cross.
Botha’s grave alongside it is a tomb about 2,5m deep with a concrete slab on the bottom. The walls of the grave are made of brick with plastered walls. It was constructed some years ago.
Botha’s coffin will rest at the bottom of the grave below a layer of concrete slabs which will be covered with soil.
Botman said he spent Monday digging out the earth from the grave — ”I actually dug that hole” — and would put it back when the ceremony was over.
An Avbob undertaker was on Wednesday morning using a plastic bucket attached to a string to scoop out the roughly half a metre of groundwater that had seeped into the grave. He was also puzzling over how to capture a large frog which was floating placidly in the water.
Several people came to look at the grave during the morning including one man from Port Elizabeth who said he had served in the South African National Defence Force at the height of Botha’s powers.
As a friend took a photograph of the grave, the man stood at mock attention and saluted.
‘Good riddance’
Meanwhile, the Congress of South African Trade Unions in the Western Cape on Tuesday said Botha was a monster at the ”same level” as Hitler.
The union federation said in a statement that it would oppose any attempts to dress up his legacy into ”anything other than the monstrous system that it spawned”.
”He was the devil personified at the same level that Hitler was, and should be treated as a pariah by peace-loving people.
”As we bury him on Wednesday, our compassion goes to his family, and our appreciation to all those who confronted the brutal regime he led.
”It is fitting that both him and his time has come to an end. Good riddance.”
Cosatu said Botha should be remembered for the pain and suffering imposed on the people of South Africa, but should also be forgiven ”because no more good time should be wasted on him”.
Botha, who died last week at the age of 90, headed the apartheid-era government from 1978 to 1989. – Sapa