Dare Not Linger
Page 13
In the afternoon on Monday, 4 July, Liebenberg, who had been abroad, got a surprise call from Mandela, who wanted him to travel from Johannesburg to Genadendal to see him. Mandela left the banquet early to meet Liebenberg at Genadendal.
‘When Liebenberg arrives in Cape Town,’ Manuel recalls, ‘Mandela asks him, “What are you doing now?” Chris Liebenberg tells Mandela that he is retired now. “How old are you?” Mandela asks. Liebenberg says that he is sixty. Mandela says, “Yes … you’re too young to retire, Chris. I’ve got an assignment for you. I want you to be my finance minister. Derek [Keys] is leaving and I want you to take over.” Chris Liebenberg is completely shocked; nothing can prepare him for this. He says, “Having just retired, I will have to consult with my wife about this.”’3
The seemingly informal and somewhat serendipitous manner in appointing Liebenberg to the position of finance minister is belied by the seriousness with which the ANC leadership formed the cabinet. The appointment of ANC ministers was not informed by caprice. These were people who had acquitted themselves admirably in their various leadership duties in structures at home and in exile. They had all been tested and developed in challenging circumstances. However, there was still a lot of vetting before a name could be given the green light.
A case in point was the aforementioned position of the finance minister. Here, Mandela conducted extensive consultations with some of his ministers, including Manuel, Mboweni and Erwin – and people such as Gill Marcus, an MP who was part of the finance committee, would sit with Liebenberg and deal with the nuts and bolts of fiscal policy.* Mandela concentrated on ensuring that the country was secure, hence his insistence on the ANC holding all the security portfolios. Trusting the two deputy presidents to whom he delegated most tasks – especially Mbeki – meant he could, as has been noted earlier, take a more hands-on approach in entrenching reconciliation. It was Mbeki then, in what others characterised as a prime ministerial role, who ran cabinet meetings on most occasions even when Mandela was present.
‘Preparation of bills,’ Mboweni remembers, ‘and planning memoranda and so on would be submitted to him.’ Even though he was hands-off, Mandela would of course keep an interested eye on progress, focusing on the armed forces and the police, and on structural arrangements for the judiciary and Chapter Nine Institutions.† Mbeki also kept him apprised of the work. Mandela would only intervene in situations where he felt that one of his ministers was being wilfully stymied.
A case in point was when Mboweni threatened to resign if certain ministers continued to block the legislation he wished to submit. Even ANC ministers held divergent views on certain issues, so this was not uncommon, although it was undoubtedly frustrating for those sponsoring bills.
On the day of submission, Mboweni recalls how
Mandela asked for an adjournment so that he could have a discussion with those ministers and myself. Well there wasn’t a discussion actually, because we just went to his office. It was quite a tiny office, and he said, ‘The Minister here has briefed me about his difficulties in getting this bill passed in cabinet, and that if today this bill is not passed by the cabinet he is resigning. I don’t want this young man to resign, so when we go back to the cabinet now, you guys must go and support the bill.’ Trevor [Manuel] tried to explain [but] Madiba said, ‘No, there is no discussion, just go back and support the bill.’
They all went back and Mboweni continued with his presentation, which was supported even by erstwhile detractors. Rather archly, Mboweni ascribes this victory to the ‘survival instinct in politics’.4
The one political organism that needed to survive, however, was the cabinet itself, the engine of the Government of National Unity. Its strength lay in its ability to make decisions harmonised by a guiding principle. Without this, it would fail. Taking a realistic view of this body blessed with multiple moving parts, MP Roelf Meyer admitted in a 1994 interview that ‘it is not going to be possible to have harmony from morning to night. We do not have a coalition in the true sense of the word, but an agreement to cooperate.’5
A little more than a year earlier, Mandela had fielded a number of questions from the BBC on exactly the thorny issue of future decision-making. ‘We will address these problems,’ he said, ‘through a government of national unity dominated by the African National Congress. The principle of majority rule will apply. No small party will be allowed to undermine the principle of majority rule … [But the ANC] point of view will prevail without undermining the principle of consensus. We will be doing with the Government of National Unity what we are doing now at the multi-party forum … we don’t impose; we persuade.’6
This was at the tail end of the negotiations, where, respectively requested by their teams to find a resolution, Mandela and De Klerk proposed that the cabinet should strive for consensus, and if that failed, the majority view would prevail.7
This was accepted and later incorporated in the interim constitution. Under chapter six, which deals with the powers of the National Executive, section 89 (2) stipulates that the ‘Cabinet shall function in a manner which gives consideration to the consensus-seeking spirit underlying the concept of a government of national unity as well as the need for effective government’.8
Indeed, according to Jakes Gerwel, speaking from the vantage point of secretary of the cabinet, the GNU did make decisions by consensus: ‘One would not be aware that it is a multiparty government if you were sitting in on the debates, on the meetings of the cabinet. You would not realise that people come from different parties.’9
Kader Asmal, certainly one of the most colourful ministers in Mandela’s cabinet, with his characteristic hoarse laugh and the mien of his lookalike, Groucho Marx, must have enjoyed the debates. ‘Consensus was allowed to establish itself in a place where everybody was comfortable through a process of argument and counter argument,’ he observed in his memoirs. He might have discerned a culture clash between the ANC and National Party in these discussions; for instance, no National Party minister challenged De Klerk in cabinet whereas the ANC was robust in their debates over certain issues, sometimes to the consternation of National Party ministers.10
Despite Mandela’s talent for nudging people towards their finer instincts, it would be wishful thinking to expect total unanimity among the members of the cabinet; there had to be someone quibbling with the proposal agreed between Mandela and De Klerk, even though it was similar to the principle of sufficient consensus used to break deadlocks during the negotiations. An indignant Chief Buthelezi remembers cabinet decisions being based on ‘majoritarianism because … I have prepared memoranda in some cases disagreeing with some of the proposed legislation and so on, and all that is said is that, “Well, what the minister of home affairs says must be noted, that’s all, but we’ll go ahead.”’11
Mandela sought to breach any chasm that developed out of the divergent and potentially mutually opposing views of the ANC and the National Party. To this end, he established the cabinet committees, which were platforms for finding consensus. Three such committees were set up, each a palimpsest – something reused but altered – from the legacy of the apartheid government. Mbeki chaired the committee on economic affairs and De Klerk those on security and intelligence and social and administrative affairs.
To embed cooperation, Mandela paired ministers and deputy ministers from different parties. ‘From the point of view of De Klerk and his party,’ he said in an interview, ‘three belong to the IFP, six to De Klerk, the ANC has eighteen, twice the combined strength of IFP and National Party. So, if we wanted to, we could just run the government, but we’re not doing that. We are committed to making the Government of National Unity something that has got a substantive content, not just a hollow content where we endorse the views of the ANC. It is for that reason that we made sure that in the distribution of portfolios, we should have deputy ministers; if a minister belongs to the ANC, then the deputy minister should belong to the National Party, or IFP. We want it to function properl
y.’12
And function properly it did in the first years, except when Mandela insisted on keeping a firm hand on the tiller in security matters, which rankled De Klerk. ‘Madiba’s focus with regard to government work was the security issue,’ Mbeki remembers:
So he would come to meetings of the cabinet committee … that dealt with security matters … because he was very concerned about the possibility of counter-revolution, and, like all of us at the time, he thought counter-revolution would come from the right-wing Afrikaner in the army, in the police, in the security sector, who would resort to arms to destabilise and then possibly overthrow the government. That was his particular interest. But with regard to the rest of the work of the cabinet, of government, he would say, ‘No, you go and attend to that.’13
However, Mandela did intervene directly with ministers on other issues when he felt it was needed, as in the contretemps between Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and De Klerk. Ministers from all three parties would come to his office to report back or seek advice, and provide reports when requested.
But as each party had its own structures for maintaining policy coherence – for instance, the ANC had its cabinet caucus and the National Party its strategic policy group – it was inevitable that a structural fault line would develop and generate tensions between the business of cabinet and the reality outside.
There was disagreement on the matter of collective responsibility for cabinet decisions. The National Party and IFP insisted on their right to deviate from collegiality and publicise criticisms of decisions they opposed in cabinet. Even though there were few issues, the differences were sharp and recurrent, complicated further by relations between the party leaders. The truth was that the GNU operated only at cabinet level and not in Parliament or in the provinces.
The advent of local elections towards the end of 1995 exacerbated tensions as the parties claimed achievements and rejected responsibility for problems. At an early campaign rally, in the contested Pretoria township of Eersterust, Mandela was blunt in addressing the issue.
‘Mr De Klerk,’ he said, ‘has been trying to create the impression that the National Party was playing a leading role in the Government of National Unity and that business confidence and foreign investments were dependent on his participation in the government.’ While he appreciated De Klerk’s role in the cabinet, he said, ‘it is wrong to try and inflate the National Party’s role out of proportion. The ANC has eighteen Cabinet members compared with only six from the National Party.’ He ended by insisting that the RDP was an ANC initiative.14
Even the most uninitiated reader of body language could see that there was a glaring absence of warmth between Mandela and De Klerk. The National Party was undergoing an identity crisis; its parliamentary caucus found itself at odds with the constraining protocols of being in opposition. The ongoing debate about whether it should continue in the GNU tended to seem like an ominous self-fulfilling prophecy. To claw back lost ground, De Klerk became, by his own account, at once critical of decisions and confrontational in pursuit of National Party policy; he did so because his own ministers and deputy ministers did not. ‘They did well enough with regard to their own portfolios,’ he writes, ‘but did not fare so well when it came to making a fighting stand against the ANC in opposing decisions which were irreconcilable with National Party Policy.’15
Those decisions deemed irreconcilable with National Party policy added to De Klerk’s woes, as did his failure to get retrogressive positions written into the final constitution. It didn’t help that he was faced with a challenge from the National Party’s Young Turks, represented by Marthinus van Schalkwyk. Much more to the point, however, was De Klerk’s admitted unhappiness with the inelegant position he found himself in, which was akin to ‘the previous chairman of the board [continuing] to serve on the board of his successor’.16
Mandela summed it up in a discussion with Tony Leon, then the leader of the Democratic Party. ‘De Klerk,’ he said, ‘had not reconciled himself with the loss of power.’17 Mandela had given De Klerk responsibilities, which the latter felt were beneath him as a former minister and president. For someone who had once entertained the idea of a ruling troika of the ANC, National Party and IFP presidency on a rotational basis, this seeming demotion made it difficult for him to convince his party of the correctness of participating in the GNU.
Matters came to a head in a cabinet discussion in January 1995, where De Klerk tabled an agenda item asserting the right of the minor parties to act publicly as opposition. De Klerk’s public criticism of the ANC, coupled with his granting of indemnity to 3,500 members of the police force and two cabinet ministers just before the 1994 election, set the stage for a showdown. After ANC ministers had spoken about collective responsibility for cabinet decisions, Mandela attacked De Klerk, citing the indemnity as ‘underhand’ and labelling the National Party’s attitude to the RDP as disloyalty to the government. Leaving the meeting in anger, De Klerk said he and his colleagues would consider their continued participation in the government. The next day, however, the two principals appeared at a media briefing with a joint statement. The misunderstanding had been cleared up and ‘we have agreed to make a fresh start, which will help us to avoid a repetition of the situation that arose earlier this week’.18
Much like in a doomed marriage, the two men’s clashes, symptoms of singularly divergent world views, were cancelled out by public acts of reconciliation. The clashes were born of an impulse to recreate an idyllic past for the minority on the one hand, and, on the other, a single-minded imperative to carve out a liveable future for the majority of South Africa’s people.
‘Whatever quarrels emerge,’ Mandela said, quashing yet another rumour about dissension, ‘Mr De Klerk and I understand that we need one another. It’s not a question of personal likes; it’s a question of absolute necessity that we should be together. I think he understands that as equally as I do.’19
KwaZulu-Natal, a province forever beset by problems of violence, created another flashpoint. In September 1995, De Klerk wrote to Mandela suggesting that the best way to address this violence would be a meeting between Mandela, De Klerk, Mbeki and Buthelezi to discuss, inter alia, international mediation and political initiatives to lessen tension and violence.20 Mandela decided to refrain from mincing his words.
‘The problems in KwaZulu-Natal,’ he writes in a letter to De Klerk, ‘and consequently the solutions to those problems, are deeply embedded in the history of the situation that prevails. You, Mr De Klerk, will certainly acknowledge that the present conflict in the province is as much the creation of the policies and strategies of your party and the government of which you were part and presided over, as of any other factors. We need not here entertain the details of that history; we have discussed that previously. It will be seriously misleading, and not helpful for finding a genuine solution, to suggest – as you do in your letter – that the question of international mediation represents one of the fundamental underlying causes to the problems in the province.*
‘I have previously briefed you fully on the discussions I had, as well as the attempts I made to have discussions with Minister Buthelezi on this subject. You are aware that all these initiatives came from me. We would require, as again I have previously told you, concrete suggestions as to exactly what it is you want discussed at the kind of meeting you propose. A futile exercise in meeting merely for the sake of meeting, and making political gestures, aggravates rather than helps resolve the situation.
‘You are as one of the Executive Deputy Presidents in my government free, and in fact have the obligation, to discuss with me any suggestions you may have about any matters of government policy and direction. It applies in this case as well. What would not be constructive or helpful would be for you offering as the leader of a third party to mediate in what is rather inaccurately being portrayed as simply a conflict between the ANC and the IFP. The historical part played by your party, and the government which it formed, in that conflict
totally disqualifies you from performing that role.’21
This was a harsh rebuke, and it simply meant that Mandela, the epitome of tact and politesse, even to his adversaries, had reached the end of his patience. The question of violence and the IFP–National Party nexus in its planning and execution, and the bloody toll it took on the people of KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere had always troubled him. And it would be wrong to forget – or expect that he had forgotten – the humiliating chorus of defiance when, soon after his release in 1990, he called on the people of KwaZulu-Natal to throw away their weapons. If Mandela was civil and polite to both De Klerk and Buthelezi, it was in accordance with his own credo of never being discourteous to another leader.22 Those leaders, in Mandela’s view, were representatives of a constituency. Any rudeness to them thus translated into a massive affront to their followers.
When De Klerk wrote back that he had not been suggesting mediation but a meeting, as a party to the agreement on international mediation, Mandela gave him short shrift. ‘Rather than suggesting pointless meetings,’ he wrote, ‘I would appreciate your input on how to deal with the legacy of the inhumane system of apartheid of which you were one of the architects.’23
A break-up in a relationship does not happen suddenly, nor is it triggered by a single cause. The weakest chink in the GNU’s armour could have been the wide gulf of an unshared history that separated the sum of its parts; the lack of chemistry between De Klerk and Mandela being the most conspicuous representation of that dissonance. But from the very start, the chances of the National Party staying the full course of the GNU were not that auspicious. De Klerk’s cabinet was unhappily divided about decision-making in the GNU, a state of affairs worsened by the party’s reduced numbers in the post-election cabinet, which weakened their influence in government. This also strengthened the hand of the faction in the National Party that wanted no truck with the ANC-dominated government.