In the following years, the ANC consolidated its power and appointed supporters to crucial offices. In 1996, it had the upper hand over an increasingly demoralized National party in the negotiations leading to the enactment of a permanent constitution. This document replaced the 1994 interim document and was enacted by both houses of the national parliament sitting together as a Constituent Assembly. The constitution was approved by an overwhelming majority of 421 to 2, with 10 abstentions.14 It had been the subject of extended public debate, in which the National party and the IFP tried unsuccessfully to obtain greater powers for the provinces. When Buthelezi saw that he was not getting his way, he repeated the tactic he had used previously and withdrew from the negotiations. In most respects, the permanent constitution resembled its forerunner. It replaced the Senate with a National Council of Provinces, which comprised delegates appointed by the provincial legislatures and whose decisions could be overridden by the National Assembly; it permitted the central parliament to override provincial legislation except in such matters as abattoirs, libraries, museums, and provincial planning; it extended the Bill of Rights chapter to include rights of “access” to housing, health care, food, water, and social security (which, in practice, were aspirations rather than justiciable rights); and it provided for the appointment of a Human Rights Commission, a Commission for Gender Equality, an Electoral Commission, and an independent broadcasting authority. In an important decision, the permanent constitution ceased to make it obligatory for the dominant party to include members of other parties in the central or provincial cabinets after the next election, which was to take place in 1999.
De Klerk by that time had become dissatisfied with his role as a member of the government. The National party was caught between its responsibility to support the government, of which it was a part, and its need to defend itself from criticisms by its caucus and electorate. The ANC, with huge majorities in parliament and cabinet, had no compelling reason to compromise on important issues. Moreover, de Klerk’s personal relations with Mandela were abysmal. Mandela was convinced that de Klerk had been responsible for the Third Force and distrusted him. On several occasions, the president denounced him in cabinet, and in September 1995 a photographer caught the two of them in a heated dispute in a Johannesburg parking lot. For de Klerk, the new constitution was the final straw because it had no provision for power-sharing beyond the 1999 election. He convened the Executive Council of the National party and persuaded a very divided meeting that the party should withdraw from the government. The result was that the National party began to disintegrate. Several leaders retired from politics; de Klerk himself retired in August 1997. Soon afterward, he divorced his wife, married a wealthy Greek woman, and spent most of his time in London.15 Mandela placed ANC members in the cabinet seats vacated by the National party. Buthelezi and his two IFP colleagues remained in the cabinet, and relations between Mandela and Buthelezi improved. The ANC-IFP conflicts decreased in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng (the province that includes Johannesburg and Pretoria), and Mandela gratified Buthelezi by naming him acting president when both he and Mbeki were out of the country.16
To its immense credit, the Mandela government transmitted to its successor a stable, democratic political system. It had respected the constitution and the rule of law. For example, in 1996, the Constitutional Court rejected the first draft of the permanent constitution on the ground that several clauses did not comply with the thirty-four principles laid down by the interim constitution. The Constituent Assembly then submitted a revised document, and the court certified it as valid. In 1998, furthermore, the Pretoria High Court ordered the president to justify his appointment of a committee of inquiry into alleged racism and corruption in the South African Rugby Union. Mandela complied. He was subjected to a severe cross-examination, and the judge, a white man, ruled against him; but Mandela’s action was eventually upheld on appeal by the Constitutional Court.17
South Africa, however, was a one-party democracy. The ANC’s closest rival in the 1999 election (see below), the Democratic party, won less than 10 percent of the vote. Other African states, such as South Africa’s neighbor Zimbabwe, that had once been one-party democracies had ended up as one-party dictatorships; and already there were signs of disrespect for the rights of opposition parties. Stanley Uys, a former political editor of the Johannesburg Sunday Times, noted that at the ANC’s December 1997 conference, Mandela himself “challenged the right of opposition parties to oppose his government in the style that would be commonplace in democracies.”18 The ANC, moreover, had significant centralizing tendencies. But there were strong checks on abuse of power by the ANC: a free press, a vigorous civil society, and powerful business and trade union organizations. Indeed, as political scientist David Welsh said, “South Africa’s stability rests upon a tacit trade-off between the political power of the majority as represented by the ANC and the economic and social power of the minority.”19
Deracializing State Institutions
The established Supreme Court of South Africa, with appellate and provincial divisions (renamed the Supreme Court of Appeals and the High Court in 1996), remained in place under Chief Justice Michael Corbett until that year, when he was succeeded by Ismail Mahomed. White male judges, some of them unsympathetic to the new regime, continued to dominate the judiciary; there were very few black or female lawyers, and the tenure of existing judges was protected by the sunset clause in the interim constitution. As late as 1998, only about 30 out of 275 judges were not white.20 Even the new Constitutional Court, whose members Mandela appointed after extensive consultations, comprised seven Whites (including the president, Arthur Chaskalson, who, like Mahomed, had been prominent in defending people prosecuted by the apartheid regime), as well as three Africans and one Asian. Two were women—one black, one white. Five came from the liberal wing of the existing bench, one was a Transkei judge, and the other five were professors or practicing lawyers.21
The bureaucracy inherited by the new regime was a vast, unwieldy, and largely inefficient public service of two million people who had been accustomed to operating the apartheid system and who, like the judges, were protected by the sunset clause. It was dominated by male Afrikaners, many of whom had no sympathy for the goals of the new regime. The Mandela government eliminated many of the obsolete departments, deployed their personnel out of “useless jobs” into essential services, announced its intention to make the bureaucracy “reflect the country’s make-up in terms of race and gender over a period of five years,” and advertised eleven thousand affirmative action positions. At its conference in December 1994, the ANC noted that “until we transform the state machinery as a whole into a loyal instrument of democracy, transfer of power to the people will not be complete.”22 But that was not possible without making the bureaucracy still more inefficient than it had been, because, as a result of the appalling deficiencies of black education under apartheid, there was a dearth of suitably qualified black South Africans. The government did manage to place reasonably well-educated supporters in the most senior posts, but most middle- and lower-level posts were held by Whites. Consequently, the bureaucracy did not become an efficient instrument for the implementation of the wishes of the new government.
The restructuring of the army was another formidable task. The government had a constitutional commitment to create a new South African National Defence Force (SANDF) from the 65,000 regular soldiers and sailors of the old South African Defence Force (SADF), members of Umkhonto we Sizwe (ANC guerrillas, estimated to number 27,000), the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA; the PAC guerrillas estimated to number 6,000), and the approximately 10,000 members of the defense forces of the four “independent” Homelands. This was a merger of very dissimilar entities, most of which had been on opposite sides in the conflict between defenders and opponents of apartheid. The SADF was a well-equipped, disciplined, standing army, navy, and air force, which had been trained to enforce apartheid, whereas the guerrillas and Homel
and units were ill-equipped and poorly disciplined troops who had been committed to overthrowing the apartheid state.23
Anticipating this problem, Joe Modise, the commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe who became Mandela’s minister of defense, and General Piet Meiring, a former commander of South African military operations in South West Africa (Namibia) who became the initial chief of the SANDF, had begun in 1993 to plan the merger. After the inauguration, they cooperated to obtain an increase of 10 percent in the security budget (thereby destroying the expectation of a substantial financial dividend from the end of apartheid) and to train the guerrillas as modern soldiers. They also won over seven former guerrilla leaders by appointing them as generals in the new army. But two serious problems arose. The guerrillas were not satisfied with their treatment, and in October 1994 many of them went absent without leave from their main training camp on the eighth day of a boycott over pay and status. It took a special visit by Mandela and the firing of 2,221 deserters to restore order.24 Second, the army, especially the military intelligence service, still included covert units that continued to oppose democratic change. As stated in the newsletter Africa Confidential, they had “a vested interest in destabilization. It is their job.”25 Nevertheless, by May 1997 there were 77,882 uniformed members in the SANDF, including 9,388 officers, of whom 8,033 were members of the former SADF, 1,079 were from Umkhonto we Sizwe, and 306 were from the APLA26 Racial tensions persisted, however, within the armed forces throughout the Mandela presidency and beyond.
The police force was probably the most venal state institution inherited by the Mandela government.27 Its primary function had been to maintain white supremacy, and it was notorious for torturing and even murdering its victims. Many police were deeply corrupt and lacked the most basic skills needed for conventional police work. Mandela’s minister of security and safety, thirty-five-year-old Sidney Mufamadi, a founding member of COSATU and the UDF, took over 130,000 police divided among eleven different agencies. Two-thirds of its members were black, but nearly all of the officers were white. From those materials he created a single national South African Police Service led initially by a white commissioner, General George Fivaz. But there was no significant improvement in the quality of the police force. Many members were still functionally illiterate. Morale was low, especially among the African members of the force, who were highly unpopular as the enforcers of apartheid. In 1997, a typical year in this respect, 232 police were murdered and more than 118 committed suicide. In 1996, moreover, 15,236 members of the police were charged with crimes including assault, murder, rape, and reckless or negligent driving, and 210 deaths occurred in police custody.28
The nine provincial governments—consisting of elected legislatures, premiers elected by the legislatures, and executive councils appointed by the premier—gradually assumed the powers that were allotted to them in the interim constitution and that were slightly amended by the permanent document. However, the provincial governments were inefficient. They had a weak revenue base, they inherited sterile, corrupt bureaucracies, and several of them were run by incompetent people; most of the better-educated ANC and IFP politicians had won seats in the National Assembly. They were also dogged by allegations of fraud, nepotism, lack of discipline, and misgovernment. In August 1997, the director general of public service and administration reported that three provincial administrations were on the verge of collapse (the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Northern Province), that four others were experiencing serious difficulties, and that only Gauteng and the Western Cape were functioning relatively well. The central government had to bail out the provinces because they had huge deficits and were hopelessly in debt.29
A lower tier comprised elected local government institutions. Their main responsibilities were health and sanitation services, public transportation, and local roads. But in most cases the municipal councils, too, lacked managerial capacity and an adequate revenue base. By 1998, 71 percent of consumers regularly paid their taxes and services charges, including electricity, but the rest did not, and the debt to municipalities mounted to nearly ten million rand.30 In the cities, the previously segregated local governments were gradually integrated into large metropolitan units run by elected councils. In African rural areas—the former Homelands—local government was a hybrid, because chiefs (”traditional authorities”) were empowered to apply customary law subject to the terms of the constitution. Attempts were made to meld the chiefs into the municipality system, but many rural Africans still honored customary law, which subordinated women to men and gave chiefs control of the allocation of tribal land. However, educated, urbanized Africans questioned how long the traditional authorities should survive.31
Truth and Reconciliation
As the first president of the new South Africa, Nelson Mandela made it his highest priority to lay the foundations of a united nation while respecting the cultures of its different racial and ethnic elements. He was particularly concerned with conciliating the most dangerous minority, the Afrikaners, who had been close to wrecking the negotiations on the eve of the 1994 election. For this purpose, he committed a series of highly publicized symbolic acts. He visited in their homes ex-President Botha and the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the principal architect of apartheid. He had General Johan Willemse, the former Robben Island commander, to dinner. He even took lunch with Percy Yutar, who had prosecuted him and got him sentenced to life imprisonment, and he joined the Sunday congregation in an Afrikaner church. In his most successful gesture, he identified with the South African rugby team, who were all Afrikaners except for one Coloured man, by walking onto the field wearing the Springbok jersey after South Africa won the World Cup against New Zealand; the largely Afrikaner crowd cheered him wildly.32
Mandela also set in motion an ambitious attempt to make South Africans come to terms with their past. Unless the crimes of apartheid were addressed, he said, they would “live with us like a festering sore.”33 This became the most contentious episode of his presidency. During the negotiations leading to the 1994 election, the National party had wanted to be given a general amnesty for apartheid. The ANC refused, but eventually de Klerk and Mandela agreed that a commission should be appointed with the power to grant amnesties to individuals, on condition that they revealed the truth and could prove that their actions were politically motivated. After looking at precedents in eastern European and Latin American states that had recently rejected authoritarian regimes, parliament created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Its mandate was to deal with gross human rights violations committed since March 1, 1960 (the month of the Sharpeville massacre). Unlike some of the foreign precedents, the TRC was to meet in public and was empowered to subpoena witnesses and to grant individual amnesties on the above conditions.34 Instead of appointing a legal body, such as the Constitutional Court, to perform this task, Mandela selected seventeen commissioners from candidates nominated by nongovernmental organizations. Most of them were chosen because of their roles in opposing apartheid. Nine were men, eight were women. Ethnically, it was a diverse group of two Afrikaners, four English-speaking Whites, two Indians, two Coloureds, and seven Africans. Mandela persuaded Archbishop Desmond Tutu to accept the chairmanship. Recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, Tutu was a man of the utmost integrity, but his appointment and that of three other clergy, including the vice chairperson, gave the TRC an overridingly emotional and religious tone rather than a legal one, even though six of the commissioners were lawyers.35
The TRC was divided into three committees: one dealt with gross human rights violations, another with amnesty, and the third with reparations for victims. Provided with a large budget, much of it from foreign donors (including $1.4 million from USAID), the commission set up an elaborate organization, with four regional offices and a large number of employees who took more than twenty thousand statements from victims of political violence. Starting in December 1995, the commission worked for more than two years and held more than fifty public hea
rings around the country. More than seven thousand individuals applied for amnesty, but by the time the TRC report went to press in 1998, the amnesty committee had granted only about 150 amnesties, and it still had another two thousand applications to deal with.36
The commission started by hearing victims of human rights abuses tell their stories, which were more horrific than anyone had imagined and fully vindicated Mandela’s suspicions that some sort of Third Force had been operating under Presidents Botha and de Klerk. Most of these statements highlighted the callous brutality of the police and military forces, including murders and exceptionally cruel methods of torture.37
The amnesty committee managed to break through the denial of responsibility by the National party politicians and their senior police and military officers. This began when Colonel Eugene de Kock, who had been found guilty of six murders and given two life sentences, applied to the amnesty committee for mitigation of sentence. He admitted many crimes, including helping to blow up the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches in Johannesburg, but he insisted that his orders had come from police generals who in turn had received their instructions from cabinet ministers. That was followed by a flood of confessions by other agents of the National party regime, and in virtually every case they fingered the top police and the cabinet, including former Presidents Botha and de Klerk. When ex-ministers Pik Botha and Adriaan Vlok applied for amnesty, they, too, said that Botha and de Klerk had given orders to kill.38
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