Ex-Guerrillas, Exiles Named to Mandela Cabinet

Election officials on Friday formally proclaimed last week’s all-race elections “substantially free and fair,” and Nelson Mandela, president-to-be of the first post-apartheid government, immediately named 17 members of his new Cabinet.

For first deputy president, the most closely watched spot, Mandela chose Thabo Mbeki, the urbane chairman of the African National Congress. He bypassed Cyril Ramaphosa, the popular ANC general secretary who was widely touted for the slot after his success as the ANC’s chief negotiator. Ramaphosa subsequently declined any Cabinet post in an apparent rift with Mandela.

Frederik W. de Klerk, the outgoing white president, will be appointed executive deputy president of the coalition government. His National Party, which has ruled South Africa since 1948, lost to the ANC by a margin of more than 3-to-1 in the first elections in which the country’s black majority was allowed to vote.

Under the nation’s new political system of proportional representation, the National Party will get six places in the 27-member Cabinet. They include such powerful portfolios as finance, home affairs and constitutional development.

Mandela told reporters that he will retain the current finance minister, Derek Keys, in his post. The move is aimed at reassuring the country’s mainly white business leaders--as well as potential investors and aid donors overseas--who are nervous about the ANC’s still untested economic policies.

“We realize the importance of leaving the department, the portfolio, of finance as it is--without interference,” Mandela told reporters in Cape Town after a three-hour meeting with De Klerk. He has previously said he would recommend that Chris Stals, governor of the Central Bank, be retained when his term ends in July.

Mandela said De Klerk had complained that naming a Cabinet was premature and had asked him to reconsider several choices. Mandela, who shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with De Klerk, said he would take the request back to his advisers.

“As far as we are concerned, it is a decision which is final, but when you are working in a government of national unity, you can’t talk about finalities,” he said. “You have to take into account the concerns of the parties with whom you are going to work.”

Despite Mandela’s frequent promises of a gender-equal society, he named only two women to his Cabinet, giving them the portfolios of health and public enterprises. His estranged wife, Winnie Mandela, was elected to Parliament but was not named to the Cabinet.

Several of the new ministers are little known, but nearly all share one thing with the 75-year-old patriarch of the anti-apartheid struggle: They either suffered in prison with Mandela, fought as guerrillas against white authorities or worked from exile to end the brutal system of institutionalized segregation and white minority rule. Most are in their 50s or older.

The formal transfer of power from De Klerk to Mandela, and from white to black after more than three centuries of racial tyranny, will be at an elaborate inauguration ceremony Tuesday in Pretoria.

The Independent Electoral Commission said the final vote tallies showed the ANC with a landslide victory of 12,237,655 votes, or 62.6% of 19.5 million ballots cast. The ANC also won control of seven of nine new provincial legislatures.

The total was less than the ANC goal of winning two-thirds of the vote, which would have created a majority in Parliament that would have enabled the party to rewrite the interim constitution. Mandela, surprisingly, said he was “relieved” that the ANC would be forced to compromise in the so-called government of national unity in drafting the charter.

The National Party won 3,983,690 votes, or 20.3% of the total. That was half of what De Klerk had called his goal but consistent with many pre-election polls. As expected, the National Party easily won the provincial race in the Western Cape region.

Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party was third nationally with a larger-than-expected 10.5% of the total vote. That gives them up to three seats in Mandela’s Cabinet and provides a major political platform for Buthelezi, a mercurial politician whose career seemed near oblivion less than a month ago.

Almost all of Inkatha’s votes came from bitterly contested Zulu areas in the strife-torn KwaZulu-Natal province. Although Buthelezi only joined the race a week before polls opened, Inkatha won an upset there, with a majority of 50.3% of the vote to 32.2% for the ANC. Other parties split the rest.

Inkatha’s come-from-behind victory in the area was tainted by allegations, by rival parties as well as independent observers, of widespread fraud and ballot rigging. But the electoral commission said it was unable to prove many of the charges.

Buthelezi hailed the win as “a moment of glory, because we know that the hardships we suffered and the battles we fought were not wasted.” He said in a statement that South Africans are now “free of oppression, free of racialism and, most of all, free of apartheid.”

The Freedom Front, which campaigned for a homeland for Afrikaners, was fourth in the national polls with 2.1% of the total. The Democratic Party, a white liberal group, won 1.7%, and the Pan-Africanist Congress, a radical black group that was once the ANC’s chief rival, won only 1.2%.

The tally gives the ANC 252 seats in the 400-seat National Parliament, which will convene for the first time Monday in Cape Town to formally elect Mandela president. The National Party will get 82 seats and Inkatha 43.

Results were announced a week after polls closed on a remarkable election. There was little or no violence, although millions of voters were forced to line up for hours or even days. But poor planning and logistic bungling complicated the polling and slowed the counting.

“Many said it would be impossible,” Johann Kriegler, the electoral commission chairman, said at a news conference at a convention center north of Johannesburg. “And it very nearly was. We had the will, but not the time.”

During the elections, he said, “we managed to pull back from disaster” by using the army and air force to deliver millions of extra ballots and voting materials and by extending voting in some areas to a fourth day. Despite a near breakdown in counting, he said, “once again disaster was narrowly averted.”

Kriegler said “no deals” were struck in KwaZulu-Natal to allow Inkatha to win over ANC complaints. And he said the country must prepare a voters roll before the next election.

“It is virtually impossible to run an election without” such a list, he said.

International observer missions from the United Nations, the Commonwealth, the European Union and the Organization of African Unity quickly endorsed the electoral commission’s assessment and results.

“The outcome of the elections reflects the will of the people of South Africa,” the missions said in a joint statement.

Mbeki was always a likely candidate for Mandela’s deputy president. He was the ANC’s most visible diplomat during its long exile. He left the country in 1961 and studied economics at Sussex University in England and military strategy in the Soviet Union. He is the son of an ANC stalwart, Govan Mbeki, who was jailed with Mandela.

But several of Mandela’s other top choices raised questions and eyebrows. He named Alfred Nzo, an enigmatic former ANC leader, as foreign minister to replace Roelof F. (Pik) Botha, who has held the post since 1977.

Nzo went into exile in 1964 and served as ANC secretary general from 1969 until 1991, when he was eased out as a poor administrator. Nzo is little-known at home or abroad and is not listed in the current “Who’s Who in South African Politics.”

Joe Modise, the portly former commander of the ANC’s largely unsuccessful guerrilla army, Spear of the Nation, was named defense minister. He was criticized for condoning torture at ANC camps prior to 1990 and has had little success in his attempts to create a national peacekeeping force made up of former black guerrillas, homeland forces and white soldiers.

Other Mandela choices were applauded.

Dullah Omar, a respected civil rights and community lawyer in Cape Town, will be justice minister. Trevor Manuel, a civil engineer who played a key role in drawing up the ANC platform for reconstruction and development, was given trade and industry. Jay Naidoo, a trade unionist who helped found the nation’s largest labor federation, will help oversee the redevelopment plan as minister without portfolio.

And Joe Slovo, the avuncular Communist Party chairman who emerged as a crucial problem-solver in the oft-bitter negotiations for democracy, was given the portfolio of housing and welfare.