After three weeks of negotiation and at least six meetings, the African National Congress, the National Party and the SABC have finally settled on the format of next Thursday’s televised presidential debate between Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. They have squabbled over the smallest detail: the NP, for example, wanted the two leaders to stand and the ANC wanted them to sit.
But agreement has finally been reached. There will be a small audience of no more than 30 senior people on each side; the moderator will be the SABC’s Freek Robinson; and the questioners will be Lester Venter and Tim Modise from Agenda, Ferial Haffajee from SABC radio, and John Simpson from the BBC. The ANC did not get its way on Robinson – it did not want him involved – but it did win on one issue at least: the candidates will sit.
As with last week’s debate between Pik Botha and Thabo Mbeki, each candidate will be given three minutes to make an opening statement. De Klerk and Mandela will then each be given three minutes to answer questions, followed by two-minute and then one-minute rebuttals.
The debate, once more, will last 70 minutes. The NP claims that the ANC has been shying away from the debates since last December, when De Klerk first issued his three-debate challenge to Mandela. The two parties finally settled on two debates, one between De Klerk and Mandela and one between Botha and Mbeki.
ANC spokesman Carl Niehaus retorts, however, that “we never had any problem with a debate, but we rejected three debates between Mandela and De Klerk because we didn’t want this to be an American-style television campaign. “We wanted the campaign to deal with substantive issues on a personal face-to-face basis.”
The NP’s Marthinus van Schalkwyk counters that “it is precisely because we wanted a more substantive issue-based campaign that we proposed three debates to begin with”.
Others in the NP say the ANC is trying to “protect” Mandela by limiting the air time of televised debates. Another dispute, for example, was over whether the debates would be strictly controlled according to time periods or whether they would be more free. flowing. The ANC consistently argued for the former and the NP for the latter. “You have to remember,” sap a senior ANC source, “that they need this exposure more than we do. “Mandela drew enormous crowds in the peoples’ forums and continues to do so in rallies NP crowds are small. They need TV.”