BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

Faced with both domestic and international pressures, the South African state was “substantially weakened” by the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Pierre du Toit notes, many activities were beyond the reach of state control: corruption, dirty tricks, and clandestine murder among them. Thus the prospect of a negotiated settlement brought great risk (the potential loss of hegemony) as well as opportunity (the prospect of stemming economic losses and maintaining political control) for the government, as it did for the ANC. Nonetheless, both parties anticipated that they might use their positions and the perceived weakness of the other party to gain from negotiation.

In fact, the negotiations began as early as 1985, when secret meetings commenced between the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and NP justice minister Kobie Coetsee at the behest of then-president P. W. Botha. These meet, ings, which were later branded “talks about talks” to reflect their prelimi_ nary and exploratory nature, actually lasted several years and coincided with the rapidly deteriorating economic and political environment in South Africa at the time. Mandela and Botha finally met in July 1989, although the two men were unable to arrive at a mutually acceptable program. Mandela insisted on a number of state actions, including the unbanning of the ANC and other organizations, the unconditional release of political prisoners, and a plan for majority rule. Botha also sought more concessions than Mandela was willing to grant, such as the renunciation of the armed struggle.

When Botha suffered a stroke in 1989, the elevation of Frederik W. de Klerk to the South African presidency in September 1989 proved to be a watershed event. De Klerk, previously education minister, and a devoted member of the National Party, was an unlikely candidate for change, yet he proved instrumental in paving the way for the transition to majority rule. With only limited consultation with his party, de Klerk removed the nearly three-decade-old bans on the Pan-Africanist Congress, the ANC, and the South African Communist Party (SACP) on February 2, 1990. He released Mandela unconditionally on February 11, 1990, after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, having earlier released most of Mandela’s compatriots.

What followed was more than three years of negotiations between, principally, the ANC and the NP, although other parties joined in these discussions. The negotiations between the ANC and NP were punctuated by repeated clashes and suspensions and occasionally public accusations that one or the other party was acting in bad faith. Moreover, this very fragile period was overshadowed by a worsening security environment, growing community violence, and accusations, later substantiated, that the state was instigating conflicts in the black community, especially between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, the Zulu nationalist organization based in the KwaZulu “homeland.”

Various explanations have been advanced for why the parties initiated—and more importantly, continued with—negotiations, despite the considerable hurdles. Hermann Giliomee argues that demographic pressures (namely the growing black population relative to whites), economic stagnation, and swelling black resistance undermined the prior stability of the apartheid state beginning in the 1980s, thereby forcing the regime to capitulate in the early 1990s. Thus, as things began to unravel, Np elites such as President de Klerk and Minister of Constitutional Development and of Communication Roelf Meyer (who served as the National Party’s chief negotiator in the constitutional negotiations) became less interested in the ethnic entrepreneurship that had underpinned apartheid’s logic, and more interested in negotiating a position for themselves; indeed, de Klerk and Meyer, among others, retained government positions after the transition.

Taking a less personalist approach, du Toit contends that “both the NP and the ANC saw themselves as the ascendant power in the negotiating process. . . . Neither considered the other to be an equal.” In other words, in the initial period, both parties thought they could win: the ANC because of its numerical superiority, and the NP because of its control over tne state apparatus and later its perception that it could counter ANC support by appealing to the predominantly Afrikaans-speaking Coloured community and building tacit alliances with the IFP. Conversely, Timothy Sisk argues that power symmetries actually existed between the parties, and that de Klerk in particular recognized that neither side could impose its solution on the other; he was simply more pragmatic than his predecessors.

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