‘If You Won One, Would You Keep It?’ : S. Africa’s ‘Nations’ Prove Political, Financial Drain

The legislators of Transkei gathered recently under the tall green dome of Parliament to rail against corruption in their land. The new prime minister’s shiny black Mercedes was double-parked on the street outside, and a few army officers stood nearby.

Less than two weeks before, Transkei’s prime minister had fled amid allegations of nepotism, fiscal mismanagement, graft and plain extravagance, finding asylum at a Holiday Inn in nearby South Africa. The army had quickly persuaded six Cabinet ministers to resign, and Parliament had chosen a 50-year-old tribal princess as the new leader.

All in all, this would have constituted a fairly extraordinary period in Transkei nationhood--if Transkei were a country.

But Transkei is one of South Africa’s independent black homelands, and its troubles last month were just another sign that all is not well with the “nations” that Pretoria created.

The homelands once were part of South Africa’s master plan for total racial separation. But now they are becoming a financial drain as well as a public relations headache for South Africa, which spends $1.4 billion a year supporting them and is the only country in the world that recognizes them as sovereign states.

When Pretoria carved out 10 homelands for the country’s black majority more than a quarter of a century ago, critics immediately said the scheme was aimed at weakening the blacks’ claim to a share of South Africa.

The homelands are shaped like jagged puzzle pieces, and some are divided into half a dozen or more islands surrounded by seas of white residents. The government forcibly moved more than 3 million blacks into the new states, which often were on poor quality, undeveloped land far from major cities.

Today, about 15 million people, more than half of South Africa’s black population, live in 14% of the country set aside for homelands. Four of them--Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei--have been granted independence by South Africa. The remaining six, although self-governing, are still part of South Africa.

The homelands ran into difficulties early on. Such things as jobs and medical care were much more scarce there than in white areas. The leaders, usually tribal chiefs, were often scorned by their people as puppets of South Africa’s white minority government.

With plenty of Pretoria’s money and little accountability, the new prime ministers and presidents bought expensive houses and cars, threw lavish parties and dug into state coffers to reward their friends.

Pricey Car and Palace

Venda’s president bought himself a $50,000 BMW with tinted bulletproof glass and armored body panels. The president of Ciskei, with an impoverished population roughly equal to that of Kansas City, built a $500,000 palace in view of his people’s mud huts. He reportedly has 200 Agriculture Department employees working on his farm.

“What on earth is to be done about the homelands?” the Financial Mail, a weekly magazine in South Africa, asked recently. “If you won one in a raffle, would you keep it?”

Some homelands have repeatedly tested the limits of their autonomy by arresting and deporting their political enemies, detaining visiting journalists without charges and triggering “international” imbroglios.

When Ciskei denied visas to a French couple who wanted to visit their son in jail earlier this year, South Africa refused to help at first, insisting that Ciskei was independent and responsible only to its own leadership. But under pressure from the French government, South Africa later intervened.

Accused in Attack

Simmering animosities between Transkei and Ciskei, Xhosa-speaking homelands separated by a 15-mile-wide white corridor of South Africa, boiled over in February when Ciskei accused Transkei troops of attacking the palace of Ciskei President-for-Life Lennox Sebe in an attempted coup d’etat.

Transkei denied the charge, but Pretoria warned that it would not allow its territory to be used by one state against another.

“Pretoria tries to create the illusion that these domestic crises are ‘international’ problems which have to be solved by ‘their’ (homeland) governments,” said Peter Vale, director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.

The result, Vale added, is that “Pretoria is conducting foreign policy with itself.”

Transkei (pronounced tran-sky) is the oldest and largest of South Africa’s independent homelands. About twice the size of Massachusetts, it stretches from mountains in the north through a gentle swale of rolling farmland to a strip of waterfalls, jagged cliffs and beaches pounded by the Indian Ocean surf.

Visas for 25 Cents

Like most nations, Transkei issues passports, grants visas (for 25 cents each) to visitors, keeps a standing army, levies taxes and debates its future in a modern legislative building in the capital.

But the passports for its 3.5 million residents are not recognized outside of South Africa, the army’s weapons come courtesy of South Africa, the economy runs on the South African rand and well over half the annual budget comes straight from Pretoria.

Transkei was considered a model homeland at the time of independence 11 years ago. But an investigation recently uncovered massive corruption.

Former Prime Minister George Matanzima and his brother Kaiser, the former president, have cost Transkei at least $35 million through mismanagement and graft, according to a commission of inquiry funded by Pretoria.

“There has been a pathetic lack of financial discipline in Transkei (that) runs like a golden thread through most transactions,” the commission said.

One scam involved the sale of businesses and property that South Africa bought from white residents and gave to Transkei at the time of independence. Many of those were sold, for 10% of their market value, to Cabinet ministers and friends of the Matanzima brothers.

220 Missing Tractors

Then, in 1985, Transkei bought 1,884 expensive Austrian tractors. More than 220 of them simply disappeared from the books. Many others went at fire-sale prices to Matanzima cronies. The recipients kept the government license plates to get free gasoline.

Transkei’s Parliament met in special session in the tidy capital of Umtata to consider anti-graft measures.

“Obviously, we’re a bit afraid if we don’t do something we could be squeezed financially” by South Africa, said Victor Mditshwa, a member of Parliament.

“I think we have learned some lessons from this episode,” the new prime minister, Stella Sigcau, said in an interview. “Power should not be kept in one person’s hands, and we must not encourage a society of a few haves and a lot of have-nots. That’s one of the things we ran away from in South Africa.”

Tribal princess Sigcau has 20 years’ experience in the male-dominated politics of this homeland, and she has a commanding physical presence as well, standing 5 feet 11. She considers Transkei “as independent a country as many others that depend economically on Pretoria,” and she favors joining South Africa as an autonomous state should black majority rule prevail there.

Divide and Rule

But many blacks oppose homeland independence on the principle that it is part of Pretoria’s “divide-and-rule tactics.” At first, in fact, Pretoria withdrew the South African citizenship of blacks assigned to independent homelands, but it has since pledged to restore that citizenship.

“The dismemberment of South Africa was done deliberately by the white government in order to entrench itself in power, to perpetuate apartheid and weaken the black majority’s claim to its rightful share of South Africa,” said Xoliswa Jozana, a political science instructor at the University of Transkei.

Transkei has not been the only homeland with financial troubles, and the South African government has guaranteed $700 million in loans to bail out homeland economies.

Pretoria contends that the homelands policy has actually reduced the burden on South African taxpayers.

“Independence has been the spur to a substantial upswing in self-development and self-assurance,” said Rodney Smith, director of development in the South African Foreign Affairs Ministry.

A large source of revenue for Transkei and Bophuthatswana has been gambling. Casinos that sit on the homelands’ borders cater to hundreds of thousands of tourists from South Africa, where gambling is illegal. The headliners at Bophuthatswana’s Sun City casino complex have included such performers as Frank Sinatra.

50% Unemployment

While the homelands have recorded modest economic growth, thanks mostly to South Africa-sponsored development, unemployment still stands as high as 50% in some districts of the homelands. The average income in the homelands is among the lowest in Africa.

South African Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha told Parliament this year that the government estimates that 5% of its allocations to the homelands are misappropriated.

Such corruption “is the result of pushing tribal leaders, who had no wealth, into positions of power,” said Jozana, the Transkei political scientist and daughter of ousted President Kaiser Matanzima.

But, she added, “now it’s going to reinforce the view that blacks on their own cannot manage their affairs and must remain perpetual wards of white South Africa.”