But now, in July 1996, following the collapse of the GNU, whether Mandela still cherished the ideal of cooperation with the PAC or not, Clarence Makwetu, the president of the PAC, turned him down. Mandela admitted as much at his belated seventy-eighth birthday celebration – which he had turned into a festive dinner for veterans, where the invitees included Urbania Mothopeng, widow of the late PAC stalwart Zephania Mothopeng.61
This was not the first dinner for veterans that Mandela had hosted. Almost two years earlier, on 23 July 1994, still awed by the ANC’s electoral victory, his joy was palpable. It must always be remembered that Mandela saw the ANC as a representative of the majority of the people of South Africa, black and white; its victory, then, was not abstract or self-indulgent as, say, in the triumph over a soccer rival. It meant another step towards attaining the cherished goal of building a democratic society.
On that occasion, he said: ‘[This] is a celebration, a homecoming to where all of us belong: the seat of government in our country. At last we are here, where the laws that kept us in bondage were conceived; where the schemes of social engineering that rent our country apart were hatched.
‘It is our task today to traditionally grace this whole establishment with the blessings of the veterans. Because, before these settlements and offices are cleansed by your towering presence, they will not be worthy symbols of the new democratic order.
‘So I thank you, dear veterans, for taking the trouble of traversing long distances to be here with us. Many an excuse would have been in order if you were not able to come: old age, health, organisational work, business undertakings, and so on. But you dared to defy all these, so we could meet in this unique assembly of the cream of veteran fighters for human rights. I once more thank you.
‘I also wish to thank the organisers and fundraisers who left no stone unturned to ensure that this event takes place and becomes the success that it promises to be: Rica Hodgson, Richard Maponya, Legau Mathabathe, Amina Cachalia, Moss Nxumalo, Omar Motani and others.* We however deemed it necessary that from the limited resources allocated to the President’s Office, the government should contribute to the catering and other services offered here. Because you deserve this for your role in bringing about a democratic and non-racial South Africa.
‘I welcome you all from the bottom of my heart – including those who join us from abroad.
‘Four decades ago – for us veterans, a short space of time! – who would have imagined that we would meet here in a forum of this nature? Yes, we used to dream and sing about the day of freedom and democracy. But we knew it would not be easy to accomplish. We did have great confidence in the final realisation of the democratic ideal. But, prepared as we were to give the anti-apartheid struggle our all, many of us sometimes felt that the new era would dawn only after we had departed.
‘In this regard, we should consider ourselves honoured to have been part of the generation that has reaped the fruits of the struggle in our lifetime. There are hundreds – no, thousands – who deserve to be here today but whose lives were cut short by the burden of a wretched apartheid existence. Others fell to the blow of the torturer and the bullet of the defender of apartheid. We salute them all. It is in their honour too that we are here today. When we say thank you for dedicating your lives to the efforts for freedom, justice and democracy, we also extend our profound tribute to them.
‘We salute all veterans for daring to stand up to those who hounded you for your role in the Passive Resistance Campaign, the Great Miners’ Strike, the Defiance Campaign, the Congress of the People and other campaigns; for your defiance of those who called you traitors in parliament for telling the truth; for your challenge to those who attached all kinds of insulting appellations to your names for opposing the pass laws and constantly exposing the terrible state of race relations in our country.*
‘I refer to you all: veterans from the ANC, the PAC, the SACP, the trade union movement, the Progressive Party, the Liberal Party, Black Sash, the Institute of Race Relations, women’s organisations, the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses and many, many more. Today, we can together say: when we said the truth will triumph, it is because we knew the truth would indeed finally prevail. And we knew too, that South Africa and all her people would benefit by this.’62
For Mandela, who was speaking during the heyday of the GNU, it was a time of exuberance where everything seemed possible. Two years later, the new government had a few unpleasant, if necessary, tasks to do. Reality called for certain reconfigurations, mainly the dissolution of the RDP office, one of the main planks of the ANC’s manifesto.
Although the RDP occupied an important place in the ANC’s election platform, the party questioned whether it should continue as a stand-alone structure or have its functions spread across various government ministries and departments. After an intense debate and lobbying by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the ANC adopted the second approach.
Veteran trade unionist Jay Naidoo recalls Mandela asking him in 1994 to lead the office for the RDP as a minister without portfolio in the president’s office. ‘We have a big task ahead,’ Naidoo recalls Mandela saying. ‘You have been driving the formulation of the RDP from my ANC office and now I want it to be in the centre of all our programmes.’63
The position of minister without portfolio is a delicate one in any government, pitting the incumbent against line ministers who feel threatened at possible incursion into their territory. According to some ministers, among them Mufamadi, the office of the RDP had not been included in Mandela’s initial list of portfolios.64 The ambiguity of the institutional position and role of the RDP ministry and its location in the presidency, compounded by its last-minute addition to the executive, both affected its performance and contained the seeds of its dissolution barely two years after its establishment. The complex funding arrangements aimed at helping government departments to reorient their priorities did nothing to lessen interdepartmental tensions.65 As a completely new structure, the RDP office was also hampered by having insufficient staff.
When he announced its closure, Mandela had to think about all those who had pinned their hopes on its success. These were the multitudes affiliated with the mass organisations of civil society – on the treadmill – ‘whose lives’, to use Mandela’s words, ‘were cut short by the burden of a wretched apartheid existence’.66 As in many cases where he had to persuade people to accept unpalatable measures, he rallied the reservoir of support among the public by being candid about the workings of cabinet.
He said, ‘Unity within the Cabinet itself has strengthened as we worked together to identify national priorities, on the basis of the RDP, without being over-constrained by exclusive commitment to the Departments we happen to head.
‘As a result of the evolution of policy affecting all the departments of state and the implementation of some institutional changes to give us the necessary capacity to implement those policies, the possibility has increased greatly for the departments each to implement the programme of Reconstruction and Development within the area of its mandate …
‘The RDP Office will be closed down. I have instructed Deputy President Mbeki to handle the matter of the relocation of the important projects, programmes and institutions, which currently fall under the supervision of the RDP Office.
‘The RDP Fund will be relocated within the Ministry of Finance … the RDP is not the responsibility of some specialised department but the compass, the lodestar, which guides all government activities.’67
Although Mandela was full of praise for Naidoo and ‘his colleagues in the RDP Office for the pioneering work they had done’,68 he must have sensed Naidoo’s unhappiness about receiving very little notice about the closure and his reassignment to another ministry. He must have been aware of the depth of feeling among elements within the Tripartite Alliance – a political partnership of the ANC, SACP and COSATU, set up in 1990 to promote the goals of the national democratic revolution – which perce
ived the change as the beginnings of a shift in the country’s macroeconomic policy.
These complex transitions were the growing pains of the new democracy. If Mandela was intent on taking those ready for the journey along with him, he first had to deal with those who wanted to get off the bus, including Liebenberg, who resigned in terms of an agreement he had with Mandela when he accepted the position in 1994, that he would only do the job until the next budget.69 He ‘stepped gracefully aside and returned to the private sector, having helped ease the transition to the first ANC finance minister,’ writes Alan Hirsch.70
In August 1995, about seven months before Liebenberg’s departure, Mandela called Manuel to a meeting and told him he wanted him to be minister of finance when Liebenberg stepped down. Mandela told Manuel that as the first black minister of finance he should expect a rough ride. However, Mandela advised him to use the time before Liebenberg left to prepare himself. In addition to his job as minister of trade and industry, he would have to learn the ropes of the finance ministry. He had to understudy Liebenberg without anybody knowing what was going on. The establishment of a committee of ministers working on the budget, which included Manuel, helped. Mandela also told Manuel to skip the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1995 – a meeting Manuel had been attending yearly since 1991 – lest his attendance invite speculation. Manuel recalls:
Madiba would call me quite regularly and say, ‘How’s it going? Are you following Chris? Are you ready – are you taking an interest in this matter?’ And then he said, ‘OK, it is all systems go, I’ll announce this at the end of Chris’s budget, which is the end of March, but there’ll be a few changes I need to tell you about. Alec [Erwin is] in finance and I want to move him to trade and industry in your position, but don’t talk to him yet. You will need a deputy, and Gill [Marcus] is doing very well in the portfolio committee and I want to move her there – don’t talk to her, either.’71
In April 1996, after Liebenberg had presented the second budget, Manuel became minister of finance, with Marcus as deputy minister of finance and Erwin as minister of trade and industry.
In all of these dealings, Mandela was confronting situations that required him to maintain a firm hand. He always consulted colleagues and advisers, but on other, more intractable issues – bearing in mind that Tambo, his confidant, was gone – he would check with Walter Sisulu. Sometimes Albertina Sisulu would arrive at Mandela’s Houghton home and they would immediately go into a huddle. As a one-time president of the United Democratic Front, who had steered the boat of the mass democratic movement during the country’s most combustible period, she was a trusted fount of experience.72
Mandela certainly needed to summon all of his reserves of wisdom and tact when it came to the question of the location of Parliament. Seemingly a small, niggling issue at first, the location of Parliament was steeped in the awkward genesis of the Union of South Africa in 1910 as a white minority unitary state. Pretoria in the Transvaal had been designated the administrative capital, the judicial capital was Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, and the legislative capital was Cape Town in the Cape Province. Natal, whose capital was Pietermaritzburg, received financial compensation for the loss of revenue that would result from the union.
The argument revolved around costs and the economic impact of changing what had been agreed in 1910. Questions arose about what it would cost to have officials regularly travelling between the two capitals; what it would cost to change the arrangement and the economic impact on the capitals. The financial impact of a bigger democratic parliament and its longer sessions became part of the argument, as did the proposition that moving inland would make Parliament more accessible to the public and more exposed to public sentiment.
When this matter was put on the agenda of the first formal meeting of the GNU cabinet, Mandela was aware that it had already triggered competition and the frenzied lobbying by public-relations companies. Speaking at the National Council of Provinces, an assembly of provincial and local governments, Mandela felt the need to calm things down.
‘Regarding the question of the seat of Parliament,’ he said, ‘we have been discussing this, and I hope all members will appreciate that this is a matter that will be handled with great care. It is a very sensitive matter. The only time I saw members of the ANC in the Western Cape agreeing very fully with the members of the NP was on the question of the seat of Parliament. The Transvaalers also speak with one voice on the question, saying that Parliament must be shifted to the Transvaal. Even my name has been involved. When we heard that the Pretoria City Council had said that the President was in favour of Parliament shifting to the Transvaal, I instructed my director general to write to them to say that I had expressed no opinion on this question.’73
Cabinet appointed a cross-party subcommittee, headed initially by Mac Maharaj and subsequently by Jeff Radebe, ministers of transport and public works respectively, to look into the matter of costs and the impacts of the proposal, and to make recommendations.* The national executive of the ANC also appointed its own task team.
While the ANC and cabinet task teams were processing the issue, intense city campaigns got under way, with ministers and ANC members getting caught up in the crossfire when protocol required public neutrality. Although Mandela had kept a straight face, he had inadvertently showed his hand during a visit by British Prince Edward in September 1994. The two men were conversing at Mahlamba Ndlopfu, unaware that they were within earshot of the media, when Mandela proudly pointed out to the prince the site behind the ridge where Mahlamba Ndlopfu stood, where he said the new parliament should be located. This media scoop set the president’s office scampering about to put out the fires blazing within the ANC and across society.
A year earlier, Mandela had firmly but gently raised the sensitivity of the matter at an ANC caucus meeting. Solemnly, he pointed out that there were strong emotions at play and that the issue should be handled with care. Then he confessed his own personal preference. There should be one capital, ‘and it should be Qunu!’74
Mandela was, however, far more severe to errant ministers, as evidenced by his notes prepared for an ANC executive meeting on 19 February 1996:
‘Nine Cabinet ministers and two deputies have broken protocol to sign a public message to President Mandela, supporting the retention of Cape Town as the seat of parliament. Their message contained in [an] advertisement in The Argus today, is viewed as a major political coup for the campaign to keep Parliament in the Cape. The advertisement is also viewed as a sturdy counterpunch to the one contained in the South African Airways magazine, Flying Springbok, featuring a multi-personalitied [sic] President Mandela promoting Pretoria as a touring attraction … ANC cabinet ministers must explain their actions at the earliest possible convenience. A process has been set by the government in this regard.’75
If the above reads like a frustrated president’s note to self, it would be leavened with humour when recounted two years later in the National Council of Provinces. Mandela said that the names ‘of the very Cabinet Ministers who had taken a decision that we must have no option whatsoever until the procedure had been complied with and the reports have come back to us, I now saw on a list that was circulating in the Western Cape, saying, “Let Parliament remain where it is”. I called them and said I wanted an explanation. We have taken a decision here that we must not express any opinion on this matter. They said: “No, we saw the names of the members of the cabinet of the NP on a list, and we were thinking, in terms of local government elections, that if we did not join … [laughter].” I then called Deputy President de Klerk and said, “You know the decision. Your Ministers have now gone public and signed a petition that Parliament should remain in Cape Town.”
‘He called his Cabinet Ministers together, and they said: “No, we saw the names of Cabinet Ministers of the ANC on a list and we decided also to join [laughter].” So I warned both parties that the strongest disciplinary action would be taken
against them if they again came out in public and expressed an opinion on the matter. That is the government’s position on this matter.’76
Manuel, one of the six ANC ministers implicated in the campaign, some of whom might have been innocent, remembers a bruising meeting with the president at Tuynhuys and recalls Mandela saying to him:
‘So, Trevor, you belong to a faction. Your faction is lobbying through the press to have Parliament in Cape Town. You know our views on the matter. You know that I think that the best option that we had to move Parliament to Pretoria is during the one term that I am president. You know that. You know that I’ve asked Mac [Maharaj] and Jeff [Radebe] to undertake research. You know all of that, yet you ignore it and become part of this faction to lobby against decisions that are in the national interest of this country.’77
Manuel tried to say that he wasn’t part of a faction; they’d never met on the issue, but Mandela would hear none of it. ‘I’m not interested in your views,’ he said. ‘You’re part of a faction; I want you to hear me, and you’re part of a faction along with all of you chaps who live here in Cape Town … You know you’re a very good minister and you will become better, but if you don’t want to be part of the collective then you must leave. How do you want to conduct yourself?’78
Although the matter had fallen off the cabinet agenda by the end of Mandela’s term, the whole experience gave people, certainly Manuel, a glimpse into Mandela’s disposition when he felt thwarted. ‘This was Madiba,’ Manuel says. ‘He had a viewpoint. You could disagree with his viewpoint, but he was head of state, and if you didn’t want to be part of the team, you had to decide how you played it.’79
For Manuel, it was ‘one of the big take-outs of that engagement. It removes the idea of this uninvolved saint who has no views of his own. He was OK with confronting people with issues, even when they weren’t comfortable.’80
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