Botha’s Reforms Debated: ‘Turning Point’ or ‘Fatal Course’ for Nation?

President Pieter W. Botha’s proposal to give South Africa’s black majority its first voice in national decision-making is provoking wide debate on whether the reforms will go far enough in meeting black demands or too far in reducing the white minority’s near-total control of the country.

With both blacks and whites divided among themselves over the proposed reforms, the debate is shaping up as a contest over the future, not just of South African politics but of the nation itself.

Yet there is concern, again widespread among both blacks and whites, that the debate will prove inconclusive and, reformers fear, that the proposals will be aborted before they are fully implemented.

“Times of reform are very dangerous times,” Chris Heunis, South Africa’s minister for constitutional development and planning, said here this week.

“The resistance to change or reform is always great because people do not want to lose what they have, the political power that they have. But there are also rising expectations that cannot be completely fulfilled. This is the moment we are now in.”

As one of the architects of the reforms proposed by Botha last week at the annual opening of the South African Parliament, Heunis sees them as a break by the ruling National Party from its past ideology of apartheid--strict racial separation.

What Botha is offering reflects his “adapt or die” challenge to the Nationalists, who have ruled for 37 years, and to his own Afrikaner people, descendants of South Africa’s Dutch settlers who hold most political power here.

The proposed reforms would offer blacks:

--A voice in decision-making at the national and provincial levels.

--Autonomy in their own local affairs.

--Acceptance as permanent urban residents.

--Approval to own land where they live, work and farm.

--An end to government resettlement in remote tribal homelands.

--Likely recognition as South African citizens.

Members of the normally critical liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party have pledged that they will support the reforms in the current parliamentary debate on government policies, acknowledging them as “a substantial break with the past.”

‘A Watershed’

White political commentators have characterized the proposals as “a turning point,” “a watershed” and “the beginning of the end of an era of absurdity” and they have praised Botha’s courage in proposing them.

The boldness of the proposals was underscored for many whites by the condemnations from the right-wing Conservative Party. Andries Treurnicht, the party’s leader, told Parliament this week that the Nationalists “might as well now be members of the anti-apartheid movement.”

“These sounds (of reform) from the state president are the death knell of white self-determination,” Treurnicht said, promising to fight to keep the country off this “fatal course.”

But selling the proposals to blacks, even as simply a basis for negotiation, is the challenge the government now faces, and the reaction from most black leaders has ranged from cautious to hostile.

“Shamocracy,” said the militant Azanian People’s Organization, declaring that it will be satisfied with nothing less than “repossession of the land.”

“Only rhetoric,” the United Democratic Front said, asserting that the proposals are designed to fool other nations and divide the black community.

The only blacks who praised the reforms without qualification were the mayors of black townships, and they are widely regarded within their own communities as having “sold out” for collaborating with the white minority regime.

Most urban blacks clearly feel that the proposals are too little, too late.

“Blacks should politely refuse to have anything to do with the so-called new deal from the government,” the influential black newspaper The Sowetan said in an editorial this week. “We do not wish to be party to any such deals even if they are sugared with the carrot of freehold rights. If people do not wish to work toward the honest realization of a dream, fate has a way of offering a nightmare.”

Heunis stresses that the proposals constitute the government’s opening offer and the reforms will ultimately depend on negotiations with black community leaders.

Yet even in this, one liberal white commentator said, there is “a rampant paternalism and arrogance that presumes to decide for blacks just how much democratic participation is good for them and how it will be set up for them.”

What such critics--white as well as black--want is open discussion among all racial groups, including such banned organizations as the African National Congress, that would lead to a national convention and a political covenant here.

“If your deeds begin to match your words,” Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the Progressive Federal Party opposition, told Botha in Parliament, “you can be sure, even at this late stage, that there are more people than not who would walk with you on that road of reform.

“But if your words, particularly now, remain just words, then our children and theirs will curse you into posterity for wasting our country’s precious resources at such a critical stage in its history.”