Lies, damned lies, politics

Mbeki doesn't like Pik's bright idea
Peter Fabricius
February 10 2008 at 01:14PM


Pik Botha, the former foreign minister, has been rebuffed by President Thabo Mbeki in his efforts to persuade the government to set up a high-powered body to manage and monitor infrastructure development and service delivery.

Botha said this week that he hoped that Jacob Zuma, the new ANC president, would be more receptive to his ideas. Botha said he was extremely concerned that the country was heading for a huge infrastructure collapse, not only in electricity but also in water and other services.

Botha said he had met Frank Chikane, Mbeki's director-general, in January 2006 to raise his concerns. He said he had given Chikane a proposal for improving public-service delivery by setting up a central body with the power to monitor it at all levels of government.

"I gave him examples of how black patients were treated dismally at state hospitals. I told him that houses were being allocated to foreign blacks to the detriment of South African blacks."

But he had heard nothing more from Chikane.

Botha was involved in a sharp exchange of correspondence with Mbeki last year, sparked by Botha's criticism of affirmative action and black employment equity, which he believes are causes of the breakdown of government services.

In July, Botha was quoted in the Sunday newspaper Rapport as saying that the ANC had lied to the old National Party about affirmative action during the negotiations for democracy between 1990 and 1994.

Botha was reported to have told a conference of the trade union Solidarity that the National Party would not have agreed to a political settlement with the ANC if it had known that the ANC was going to implement affirmative action in the way it had.

Botha's reported remarks drew a sharp response from Mbeki, who wrote an eight-page letter to him on July 17. Mbeki strongly denied that the ANC had lied about affirmative action during the negotiations.

"We have never hidden our resolve that the new South Africa should 'recognise the injustice of the past', as our constitution says," Mbeki wrote.

"Neither have we been equivocal about our commitment to the view stated in our constitution in the following words: 'to promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination, may be taken..."

Mbeki said that, by agreeing to this clause of the constitution, the old NP had committed itself to eradicating "the deeply entrenched inequalities that centuries of colonialism and apartheid had bequeathed to all of us."

He said the ANC had been under pressure from its constituents to move faster to redress the legacy of inequality.

"We did not do this because we had to address both black and white concerns and interests" but "very few of our white compatriots seem to understand what the ANC has done for many decades and continues to do to this day.

"To present the matter in its most naked form: for decades, to date, because of its commitment to non-racialism, and its love for our country and all its people, the ANC has stood as a buffer between a deeply aggrieved black majority and a white minority that seems mercilessly insensitive to the grievous harm that was done to millions, in its name."

But, Mbeki said, the ANC was now being attacked by Botha and other whites because its "measured pace towards the creation of a non-racial society has not been measured enough!"

In a reply to Mbeki on July 19, Botha denied he had said that the ANC lied to the NP about affirmative action. But he confirmed that he had told the Solidarity meeting on July 13 that, if the ANC had demanded that the Employment Equity Act, and in particular the way it was implemented, be incorporated in the new constitution, the constitution would not have been agreed to.

Botha told Mbeki in the letter: "You know that we could not have agreed and have not agreed to a process based solely on racial demographic representivity.

"Surely you will agree that young white children who were at school in 1990 and who had no connection with apartheid should not be punished for the sins of their fathers and grandfathers?

"I am not advocating the discontinuance of affirmative action, though I feel strongly about announcing a time limit.

"I believe that a thorough analysis should be made as to whether the majority of black people have benefited markedly from the particular way in which affirmative action is applied. Are the disadvantaged not becoming more disadvantaged?

"Why can't we debate adaptations to the current model without being suspected of racist motives?"

Botha complained that many people from elsewhere in Africa who became South African citizens after 1994 were benefiting from black economic empowerment and affirmative action.

Botha attributed much of the blame for the current breakdown in services to affirmative action because "whites who have the skills to manage efficiently electricity production and distribution, sewage systems, roads planning and construction, water supplies and other disciplines are removed and replaced by inexperienced blacks."

The breakdown in service delivery was hurting blacks even more than whites, Botha said. - Foreign Service

This article was originally published on page 4 of Sunday Independent on February 10, 2008