Whites Guarding Political Power : After Some Gains, Reform Is Stalled in South Africa

The South African Parliament met here last week for a rare special session called by President Pieter W. Botha to bring the country’s black majority into “decision-making at the highest levels of government.”

The session was billed as the first major step toward political “power-sharing.” But the legislation on the agenda consisted largely of the odds and ends of bills left over from the regular January-to-June session--ranging from establishment of a motor vehicle accident fund to requirements for high school graduation.

Nowhere to be found was a promised bill establishing a national council in which black leaders would sit with whites to lay the foundation for the new power-sharing constitution that Botha sees as the solution to the nation’s deepening political crisis.

The Colored (mixed-race) and Indian chambers of the racially segregated, three-chamber Parliament had so little to do that within two days they suspended most of their sittings and returned home, while the white chamber debated the 10-week-old national state of emergency.

‘Facade . . . Collapsed’

And although government spokesmen insisted, as state-run Radio South Africa put it, that “the reform process has gained a momentum that cannot be stopped,” Botha made no speech outlining his vision of the future or calling for enactment of reforms beyond those already passed.

“Even the facade of reform has collapsed now,” Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, former leader of the white opposition Progressive Federal Party, said as Parliament met. “That does not mean they won’t try to rebuild it, but for the moment even the pretense of reform seems to be gone.”

Members of Botha’s ruling National Party insist this is not so, but they acknowledge that, as one senior government official said, “For the moment, we are stalled.”

“Establishment of a national council is not really a matter of legislation but of negotiation, and for negotiations we need relative calm that we don’t have at the moment,” says Christoffel van der Merwe, a leading National Party member of Parliament.

Progress Slow, Difficult

Whites as well as blacks are coming to realize that reform in South Africa no longer revolves around issues of desegregation and equal opportunity but around the question of political power. That makes progress slower, more difficult and, for the present, more doubtful.

“When we say we want the abolition of apartheid, we are not talking about integrating restaurants and bars, nor even about the desegregation of schools and residential areas,” Archie Gumede, co-president of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups with more than 2 million members, said in an interview in Durban.

“What we are talking about is political power, the power to recreate society on the basis of what the majority of people in this country want.”

There have been changes, however, and even Gumede acknowledges their scope.

Laws requiring blacks to get government permits to live and work in urban areas were repealed last month.

Blacks Regain Citizenship

Nearly 3 million blacks who lost their South African citizenship when four tribal homelands received nominal independence have had it restored.

Blacks may now own their homes and businesses, rather than just lease them from the government, and they may set up shop in downtown areas previously reserved for whites. Black businessmen will shortly be freed from many other government regulations to encourage entrepreneurship.

Blacks were appointed last month to new provincial administrations for the first time and will also get jobs on new regional councils.

And hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government funds have been promised for development of the country’s black townships, particularly for new housing, and to create jobs that will relieve black unemployment, which exceeds 60% in some areas.

“I don’t say the government is not doing things, because it is, but mostly it is undoing things that should never have been done, and often they are done with a sleight of hand that means things don’t change all that much,” Gumede said.

Reforms Discounted

Blacks have complained that many of the reforms have offered less than meets the eye.

For instance, the blacks who had their citizenship restored represented less than half of those in the nominally independent tribal homelands. Only those born in South Africa or meeting other requirements benefited.

Repeal of the hated “pass laws” that restricted blacks from entering urban areas were followed by police raids on squatter camps and tougher controls on “illegal immigrants,” mostly homeland residents whose South African citizenship was not restored. And while downtown areas were being opened to black, Indian and Colored businessmen, nonwhite shopkeepers were still being moved out of adjacent areas zoned for white merchants only.

“This regime is motivated by the hope that these other so-called reforms will distract us from our main goal, the transfer of power to a government of all the people,” Gumede said.

The Nationalists have made it plain in recent weeks that they will not yield power willingly, that reform may mean sharing power but does not mean giving up control of the government.

“The ideological abandonment of apartheid that the government refers to when it speaks of reform is not the same as the abdication of political control and white dominance,” says Slabbert, who quit Parliament six months ago in frustration over his inability to change the system from within.

“What we have in this so-called ‘reform process’ of the government is a search for ways and means of accommodating black South Africans at the political center without the loss of white control.”

Nationalists put it differently but do not reject Slabbert’s analysis.

Want ‘Group Security’

They say they want a system that ensures “group security” and “group self-determination,” phrases that formed the theme of the party’s special convention in Durban earlier this month.

Some Nationalists say that they would give up their position of political dominance if assured that blacks, about 74% of South Africa’s 34 million people, will never be able to dominate them and the Colored and Indian minorities. It is unclear what they envision, except perhaps a system so full of checks and balances and requirements for consensus decisions that no single racial group could impose its will on any other.

They also say they want to expand the process of desegregation, already advanced in South Africa’s major cities, but insist that this must not undermine “group identity” through the integration of residential neighborhoods and schools.

The pace of change must be controlled to ensure stability, they emphasize.

The result is an acute political deadlock.

Without turning the civil unrest of the past two years into a full-scale insurrection and confronting the government’s armed strength, blacks are unable to force the whites to yield more than a limited measure of power.

Blacks Have a ‘Veto’

Yet, whites now realize that they no longer are able to enforce their policies on blacks unilaterally, that blacks have, in the words of University of Cape Town political scientist Robert Schrire, an “effective veto in South African politics.” Unless black aspirations are satisfied, they acknowledge, there will be no peace here.

“The only way out is compromise, a tolerable compromise between black aspirations and white aspirations,” says Van der Merwe, one of the National Party’s political strategists. “Unfortunately, we are still some distance away from that, and I cannot predict when we will even approach it.”

That is the soft side of the government’s position.

The hard side was dramatically illustrated in mid-May when the Cabinet under Botha rejected proposals by a special Commonwealth commission that would have brought the government into negotiations with the outlawed African National Congress on a new political system for South Africa.

“P.W. (Botha) suddenly saw where this Commonwealth mediation was going to lead, and he not only balked, but he reversed directions,” a senior Western diplomat who closely followed the Commonwealth effort said later. “Basically, the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons Group was asking him to negotiate away white control, and he was not, absolutely not, going to do it.”

Cross-Border Strikes

That government decision also led to military strikes against suspected ANC facilities in neighboring Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, to greater resistance to international pressure and to the present crackdown on opposition groups here.

Van der Merwe and other government spokesmen rationalize the new toughness, which appeared to reverse earlier promises of further reforms, as necessary to ensure that any eventual negotiations on the country’s future start on a sound basis.

“The National Party has been retreating from many of its previous positions, and it has created the impression that we are finished and on the way out,” Van der Merwe said. “Blacks, seeing this, do not realize that their ideal goals, their optimum gains, are not attainable. Thus, they have the feeling that, if they hold on and push a little harder, white power will fold and so why compromise, why negotiate.”

The current state of emergency, which gave the police and army virtual martial-law powers to restore order, was thus intended not only to break the mounting political violence but to demonstrate that the government is still in charge.

To Show White Power

“To get people to talk with us, the party’s strength must be demonstrated so that blacks will realize white power is not collapsing and that negotiations and compromise are the better strategy,” Van der Merwe said.

The proposed national council, originally put forward as a top-level advisory body on black affairs but later upgraded into a negotiating forum on a new constitution, was to have been the government’s key move, and legislation establishing it was to have been enacted at last week’s special session of Parliament.

But plans for the council have been put off for several months and perhaps until next year, according to National Party sources, while the government does what another member of Parliament called “a major rethink on our whole approach to power-sharing.”

J. Christiaan Heunis, who as minister of constitutional development and planning is the architect of the government’s reform program, tried during the National Party convention in Durban this month to make the council more attractive, offering urban blacks the opportunity to elect representatives to the body.

Heunis won approval of other proposals to the convention, including a multiracial council of state as the country’s highest policy-making body, but amid such confusion that few could say later where they thought the country was headed.

Blacks Not Interested

No blacks, however, were interested. Not even the most moderate of black leaders have been willing to participate in the national council on the government’s terms. Instead, they are insisting that the government meet their terms, including the release of Nelson Mandela, imprisoned leader of the African National Congress.

“The government has not even provided a basis for talks about talks,” Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu leader, said after the National Party convention in Durban. “At the base of all the proposed reforms, there remains the apartheid-era concept of separateness.”

Without Buthelezi, a key though controversial figure in black politics, and local leaders such as Steve Kgame, head of a group of elected black urban politicians, the national council will attract no other participants, and there will be no dialogue, no negotiations and thus no “tolerable compromise,” as Van der Merwe put it.

Schrire at the University of Cape Town sees the problem largely as a result of government efforts to deal only with leaders it believes it can control and to whom it could thus dictate a settlement.

“The government has yet to understand that it is not possible to improve race relations in the absence of effective black leaders,” Schrire said.

Must Renounce Violence

Although Botha has offered to free Mandela and other black nationalist leaders, he has insisted that they renounce violence as a means of ending apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule, terms the black leaders reject as a denial of all they have stood for over the past four decades.

Van der Merwe, who himself has called for Mandela’s release, agrees that “we have to come to a settlement with effective leaders (because) there is no use in trying to create political illusions and then basing decisions on those illusions.”

“No radical leader, no radical organization is beyond the pale for me,” he continued, ignoring the recent declarations of Cabinet ministers that the government would never negotiate with the ANC, “but it is hard, at least at present, to recognize those whose power is based largely on violence.”

Slabbert, now the political outsider, sees only two options now for the government and all white South Africans:

“We can either work toward a non-racial society, that is a system where there will be no ‘group security’ and thus no longer white control, and try to make the transition as painless as possible. Or, we can be dragged into it as painfully as we ourselves can make it.”

“Everything the government is doing,” Slabbert continued, “is meant to ensure continued white control when politics, history and, most of all, demography are all against it.”