Blacks Reject Botha Offer on Advisory Panel

Black leaders on Tuesday condemned President Pieter W. Botha’s offer to include blacks in white-ruled South Africa’s highest advisory body and called for genuine power sharing and an end to apartheid.

Botha said in Port Elizabeth on Monday that he was prepared to include blacks on the President’s Council, a panel made up of members of the white, mixed-race and Asian population and forming part of the new three-house parliamentary system of government introduced in September, 1984.

Nthato Motlana, chairman of the Soweto Civic Assn. and one of the black township’s most respected leaders, said Botha’s offer “gives blacks no hope for the future, no hope at all.

“What we want is the complete dismantling of apartheid and a parliament representing all the people of this country,” he said.

Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, political and tribal leader of the 6-million-strong Zulu nation, said: “In this country, (the issue is) power sharing or revolution. The President’s Council has no authority to take decisions and black involvement in it is not a step towards power sharing.”

In another development, about 3,500 mixed-race university students and high school pupils agreed at a rally on a university campus outside Cape Town that the students should return to their classrooms today. Police fired tear gas, birdshot and rubber bullets as the students left the rally.

On Sept. 6, Carter Ebrahim, the minister for mixed-race education, shut down the Cape area’s 465 mixed-race schools after weeks of bloody anti-government rioting.