Key topics:
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1992 referendum ‘covenant’ vs claims about Solidarity and ‘No’ voters
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ANC shift to transformation/NDR undermines 1992 negotiated promises
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Roelf Meyer’s negotiation role, perceived failure, and ambassadorship
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By James Myburgh*
One of the attack lines currently being used against the Solidarity Movement is that, as very young men, some of its current leaders – and its institutional precursor in the form of the Mine Workers Union (MWU) – supported a “No” vote in South Africa’s 1992 whites-only referendum. Notably, in an interview with eNCA, aired following the news he had been chosen by Cyril Ramaphosa to be South Africa’s next ambassador to Washington DC, Roelf Meyer warned darkly that the 30% of white people who voted “No” in the referendum are “still here,” and are “represented by AfriForum and those who are thinking that way.”
This was a somewhat jarring attack. To begin with, it was Roelf Meyer who started out life as a loyal Nat apparatchik. He pursued a “textbook” rise through the organs of Afrikaner nationalist power, progressing from the Afrikaner Studentebond to the Rapportryers, then the Ruiterwag, and finally the Broederbond. After his election as a National Party MP for the Johannesburg West constituency in 1979, he became an acolyte of both the NP’s Transvaal leader, FW de Klerk, and Adriaan Vlok, the Minister of Law and Order. In December 1986 he was appointed by President PW Botha as Vlok’s deputy.
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In that role Meyer publicly defended both mass detentions without trial (as “worth it”), and the continuation of the state of emergency even after the security situation had been stabilised, as there was “no guarantee that those people who two years ago tried to make South Africa ungovernable would not make a similar attempt.” When challenged on the SABC some years later, as to whether his government had ever ordered the killing of radicals – the police’s C10 unit had operated with impunity during his tenure as deputy minister – Meyer responded: “No, a hundred times no.”
In the past obeisance to the ANC could wash away all sins, but given the liberation movement’s tarnished reputation today, it is questionable whether this remains the case. In any event, the hard fact of the matter is that Meyer willingly served in the apartheid system, at the very highest levels, while the Solidarity movement’s leaders have no such background. More importantly, the “Yes vote” was not just a vote to firmly put apartheid in the past, as it is commonly remembered, but for a particular kind of democratic system. If one is to use the referendum as a moral yardstick, the relevant question is not which way individuals voted on the day, but whether they subsequently kept faith with the covenant forged on 17 March 1992.
I
The referendum was called by President FW de Klerk in late February that year, following recent Conservative Party by-election successes. The question put to white voters was “Do you support continuation of the reform process which the State President began on February 2, 1990, and which is aimed at a new constitution through negotiation?” Though the referendum is cast as a vote for or against apartheid, this is not wholly accurate. The dismantling of the legislative edifice of apartheid, which had begun in the late 1970s, had been completed by 1991. Indeed, South Africa was – for the first and last time in its history – a country without operative race laws at the time.
The “No” camp was a coalition of both reactionary and conservative elements united in their distrust of both the NP and the ANC, and deeply fearful of the implications of surrendering political power. Many clung to the leaden lifebuoy of apartheid ideology, while others sought some other far more minimalist and morally defensible federalist solution. The “Yes” voters, for their part, were fearful of the immediate consequences of a “No” vote – and the “chaos” they were warned would erupt – and, while concerned as to what the future would bring, put their faith in their government to deliver on certain binding commitments made during the campaign.
At its first meeting of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) in late 1991, the representatives of the SA government, the ANC, and other parties declared their solemn commitment to a South Africa “free from apartheid or any other form of discrimination or domination,” which would strive to “ensure equal opportunities and social justice for all South Africans.” Among the commitments made in relation to the constitution, yet to be negotiated, were that language rights would be respected, there would be a “separation of powers between the legislature, executive and judiciary with appropriate checks and balances”, and the constitution itself would be “guarded over by an independent, non-racial and impartial judiciary.”
At the launch of the “Yes” campaign on 2 March 1992, which the Democratic Party was also part of, President FW De Klerk promised that “we will not negotiate a suicide plan, or a surrender plan to Communists or Socialists.” Given what had already been agreed to in the early CODESA discussions, he now sought a very specific mandate for the attainment of several still outstanding “minimum requirements” in the negotiations. These were as follows:
(1) The maintenance of all the values that are so important to you and me and millions of other South Africans;
(2) The prevention of domination and abuse of power;
(3) The effective protection of minorities;
(4) The securing of property rights;
(5) Professional security for all in the public service;
(6)(a) A market-orientated economy with free enterprise, and the (b) capacity to finance the vast social programmes lying ahead of us, and which are so necessary in our country;
(7) The maximum devolution of powers to regional and local government, constitutionally enshrined;
(8) Distribution of the powers currently concentrated in the hands of the State President.
A landslide “Yes vote,” De Klerk declared, would be a “specific directive to the NP to negotiate for all these things. If it succeeded, there would be no point in going back to ask voters for a new mandate.” De Klerk denied claims that he was asking for a blank cheque in the negotiations: “If you give us a renewed mandate by means of your Yes, you will not be giving me a blank cheque. You will, in fact, be giving us a very specific cheque, a directive to realise all these goals through negotiation.” He also made the following promise:
“The truth is that I, the government and the party which I lead are strongly opposed to any form of domination. We will not allow ourselves to be misrepresented about this. Black domination is as unacceptable as White domination. That, precisely, is why we say that power-sharing without domination is the answer. We reject, unequivocally, any ideas about a winner-takes-all dispensation. We think that is the worst possible system for a country like South Africa. Similarly, we are absolutely opposed to communism, an ideology that has failed everywhere in the world.”
He further emphasised, during the brief three-week campaign, that a “landslide win” for the Yes vote would send out a positive message that “White South Africans have committed themselves to a new constitution based on power-sharing without domination.” On the day, 85% of eligible white voters turned out in the referendum, and 68.6% of them voted in favour of “Yes.” Given the gravity of what was at stake – and the responsibility that now lay in the hands of the NP government – this was more a covenant than just a simple “mandate.” In his victory remarks following his side’s landslide win De Klerk declared that the book had now been closed on apartheid in favour of the “only policy that could work, and that is power-sharing and cooperation.” In his concession speech, the leader of the “No” campaign, Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht bleakly predicted that “the Yes vote will now have to pay its bill. They have voted for power sharing. They will now find out what it means to lose power and to not have power of your own to protect your own freedom.”
With apartheid now irrevocably in the past, Afrikanerdom was divided as to what to seek to replace it with. The more blue-collar Afrikaner “right wing” outsiders held to the unrealisable ideal of a volkstaat. The alternative pursued by the NP’s governing Broederbond clerisy was no less delusional, however. They saw their future role in a “power sharing” dispensation as akin to Greece to the ANC’s Rome. The ANC’s inclusion in government would restore democratic legitimacy to the political system, while the Broeders would keep the machinery of state operating and teach the newcomers how to govern effectively.
By contrast, while the ANC leadership endlessly obfuscated its true intentions through the transition, it remained quietly determined to achieve certain ultimate goals which it regarded as sacrosanct. Whatever concessions had to be offered in the short term to ease the transfer of power, these should place no permanent obstacles in the path of the implementation of the National Democratic Revolution – the liberation movement’s Soviet-inspired 1962 programme of revolutionary race nationalism. The movement’s revised strategy, as decided upon in late 1992, was to take a phased approach to the realisation of these objectives, and implement them over a twenty-to-twenty-five-year period.
II
Roelf Meyer’s task after being appointed the NP government’s chief negotiator was to deliver on the mandate the government had just received in the referendum. The negotiations followed a winding and precipitous path between 1992 and 1996. The interim constitution of 1993, and the constitutional principles which were supposed to guide the drafting of the final constitution, were broadly in line with what referendum voters had been promised in 1992. After the 1994 elections, in which the National Party received most white votes, followed by the Freedom Front, Meyer continued presenting power sharing proposals for inclusion in the final constitution. These were finally rejected by the ANC in early 1996. Meyer was then shifted out of government and made NP Secretary General. On 9 May De Klerk announced that the NP would be leaving the GNU at the end of June 1996. In his statement he acknowledged the NP’s failure in achieving one of its most central objectives in the negotiations:
“The National Party has, since the inception of the negotiating process, attached the greatest importance to power-sharing. The new constitution contains no provision for the continuation of any form of joint decision-making in the executive branch of government. I told President Mandela during the negotiating process that the failure to include any such provision in the new constitution could lead to our withdrawal from the Government. Mr Roelf Meyer also conveyed the same message on a number of occasions to Mr Ramaphosa. Now that the ANC has opted for a simple form of majority rule … it would be unnatural to continue in the GNU while everybody knows that the principles on which it rests have already been discarded in the new Constitution.”
In 1997, with the transfer of power now complete, the ANC allowed the fog that had lain over its true goals to lift, as it abandoned reconciliation for “transformation.” The liberation movement now publicly declared that it planned to enforce “African hegemony” and “demographic representivity” across all spheres and at all levels of society. All racial imbalances were to be submerged beneath a long-planned “flood of affirmative action.”
Whites and other minorities were to be gradually but purposefully weeded out of their institutions, until their proportion matched that in the total population. The ANC also now adopted an overt policy of cadre deployment to extend the power of the liberation movement “over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.”
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III
Once the shape of this new political order started becoming apparent, a profound sense of betrayal and abandonment set in among Afrikaners. As one wrote in a letter to an Afrikaans newspaper in 1997: “The NP received a mandate from us to protect and secure our interests at all times. De Klerk did not get a mandate to lead, like a Judas goat, his unsuspecting people to the political slaughterhouse.”[1] White voters issued their final verdict on the performance of the NP during the negotiations in the June 1999 elections. Both Yes and No voters switched across en masse to the Democratic Party of Tony Leon. Though English-led, the DP – with its historic and instinctive aversion to race classification and race discrimination – was seen as a far more reliable opposition to “domination and abuse of power”, and a more credible defender of the rights of minorities, than power-seeking Nat and ex-Nat apparatchiks ever could be.
To be fair to the NP negotiators, the power-sharing ideal, like the Volkstaat one being concomitantly pursued by the Freedom Front, was always a mirage. The eight “minimum requirements” laid out by De Klerk on 2 March 1992 were, by contrast, politically realistic and morally defensible. They were also in the interests not just of South Africa’s racial minorities, but of all the country’s people. And it is by whether Meyer secured any of these that his record as chief negotiator can reasonably be judged.
When minorities turned to the final constitution to defend themselves from the implementation of the NDR, they found it offered only very limited and weak protections. The extensive provisions protecting the “professional security” of those in the public service contained in the 1993 interim constitution, were completely excised from the 1996 version. Cadre deployment (and later “State Capture”) was also greatly facilitated by the constitutional powers granted to the President to appoint whomever he wished to head all organs of state power.
The Equality Clause of the Bill of Rights was meant to safeguard all South Africans from race discrimination. But on the ANC’s interpretation of this provision, not only did this clause not protect minorities against discrimination, but it made it mandatory across every sector of society. Equality of outcomes (“substantive equality”) was the guiding ideal of the transformationists, not the equality of opportunities promised during the negotiations. The newly established Constitutional Court, for its part, was soon filled to the brim with ANC struggle lawyers.
The Constitution also provided weak protections for property rights. The ANC government’s confiscation of mining rights in the early 2000s, combined with the imposition of onerous Mining BEE requirements, deterred any further investment in South Africa’s mining sector. Along with the ruination of Eskom by the transformationists, this killed off economic growth, pushed up black unemployment to record levels, and drastically curtailed the state’s capacity to “finance the vast social programmes” necessary for the country. The constitution could also hardly be said to have secured the “maximum devolution” of power possible. The transformationist model of over-centralisation, rampant cadre deployment, expulsion of skilled officials, and the marginalisation of racial minorities (outside the Western Cape), were all extended to the municipal sphere in 2000.
IV
Though FW de Klerk bore ultimate political responsibility for the NP’s failures in the negotiations, morally he kept faith with the commitments he had made to his voters in the early 1990s. The Foundation he established – headed by Dave Steward – did exemplary work defending the spirit of the 1994 settlement against the harsh racial nationalist objectives of the NDR. The Solidarity Movement, founded by Flip Buys in the early 2000s, rejected the old failed pre- and post-1992 Afrikaner political approaches, and focused instead on building up Afrikaner organisational self-reliance (selfdoen) within South Africa’s democratic system. This project has been entirely consistent with the covenant forged in the 1992 referendum. Indeed, AfriForum and Solidarity have fought harder and more effectively than anyone else to uphold Judeo-Christian moral values, oppose domination and the abuse of power, protect Afrikaners and other minorities from bullying and discrimination, secure property rights, and so on.
What though of Roelf Meyer? In a 1996 Mail & Guardian profile, the journalist Mark Gevisser described Meyer – then still basking in the glow of the “political miracle” – as “one of the most likeable personalities you will ever meet.” But, he caveated, although Meyer “is affable and informal, he remains enigmatic. Unlike Pik Botha or Leon Wessels’ over-emotional repudiations of the past, he offers no articulation of his transformation. And always conventional and never a rebel, he has never considered the option of dissent…” Though still a senior NP leader at the time, Meyer, when asked, could not find anything to differentiate his worldview from that of his frog-boiling ANC colleagues. Gevisser observed, “Meyer goes out of his way to emphasise the fact that there’s very little separating the two at all. The overall objectives of the NP and the ANC, he says, are very much the same…”
After leaving the NP in 1997, and following a political detour through the United Democratic Movement, Meyer finally announced that he was voting ANC in 2004. He formally joined the party two years later. Twenty years on Meyer remains as affable and likeable as ever, and as “enigmatic.” He remains morally unburdened by his failure, as the NP’s chief negotiator, to properly secure any of the eight “minimum requirements” in the final constitution. Though bemoaning the rampant looting of State-Owned Enterprises through the Zupta era, he still insists that the South African constitution that he helped negotiate is not just the best for South Africa, but the “best constitution in the world.” As he told BizNews in 2023, the shortcomings that people have experienced “now and over the last 30 years has nothing to do with the content of the constitution. It’s the execution.”
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One of the motivations behind appointing Meyer as South Africa’s ambassador is, no doubt, that as an Afrikaner with a storied role in the “political miracle” of 1994, he will, once installed in Washington DC, effectively counter the Trump administration’s claims that the Afrikaners, and other minorities, have been maltreated under the ANC regime. He is certainly entitled and qualified to defend the liberation movement’s position on some of the hot button issues in dispute – the Expropriation Act, the legalisation of “Kill the Boer,” violence against farmers, onerous BEE ownership requirements, the recent imposition of a 4% employment quota for white males, etc. But if he does so, it is important for all to remember that it will be he – not Solidarity – who is in flagrant breach of the covenant of 1992.
*Dr James Myburgh is the editor of Politicsweb.co.za with whose permission this article is republished.
