AUDASE

Last of the apartheid-era hardliners, the 'Great Crocodile' of Afrikaner politics who arguably destroyed the National Party
P. W. BOTHA, the eighth Prime Minister and the first State President of South Africa, was a contradictory figure. Although he admitted that the apartheid state “must adapt or die” and introduced constitutional reforms that brought Coloured and Asian representation into Parliament and the Cabinet, he also ignored the demands of Africans and supervised the brutal crackdown on violent anti-apartheid unrest that had threatened to render South Africa ungovernable. He famously wagged his finger in 1985 during the Rubicon speech, declaring to the opponents as well as to the friends of apartheid South Africa: “Don’t push us too far.”
Nevertheless, history may well judge that P. W. Botha rather than F. W. de Klerk destroyed the unity of the National Party (NP) that had ruled South Africa since 1948. The Groot Krokodil (Great Crocodile) of Afrikaner politics dominated the defence of the nation for 23 years from his appointment as Minister of Defence in 1966 to his retirement in 1989.
Pieter Willem Botha was born in the Orange Free State in 1916. He studied law at Grey University College, later the University of the Orange Free State, leaving without a degree. He quickly became active in National Party politics in the Cape. Legend has it that as a 20-year-old political organiser he broke up United Party meetings while sitting astride a horse. In 1939, he joined the Ossewabrandwag, the extremist paramilitary organisation that supported Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Botha avoided internment when he broke away from the organisation, accusing it of meddling in National Party affairs. After the war his political rise continued: in 1948, after the NP victory over Jan Smuts’s United Party, P. W., Secretary of the Cape National Party, was elected as an MP for the Cape constituency of George.
In 1958 Hendrik Verwoerd,apartheid’s visionary leader, appointed Botha Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, and in 1961 he entered the Cabinet as Minister of Community Development and Coloured Affairs.
In April 1966, five months before Verwoerd’s assassination, Botha became Minister of Defence. In the same year, he was elected leader of the National Party in the Cape. Helen Suzman recalled in her memoir Botha’s vicious reaction to the murder of the Prime Minister. He screamed across the chamber: “It’s you who did this. It’s all you liberals. You incite people. Now we will get you. We will get the lot of you.”
Between 1966 and 1978, Botha built strong power bases in the Cape and the South African military. Despite the embarrassment of presiding over South Africa’s intervention in Angola in 1975 and rapid withdrawal in 1976, Botha was at the centre of a maelstrom of theory and planning in the mid-1970s.
In 1975, launching the Defence White Paper, he declared: “Defence strategy embraces much more than military strategy. It involves economy, ideology, technology, and even social matters and can therefore only be meaningful and valid if proper account is taken of all these other spheres . . . This, in fact, is the meaning of Total Strategy.” During the 1980s, the Total Strategy would lead to “securicrats”, as the security officials became known, interfering in almost every aspect of South African society in a flailing attempt to avoid the collapse of apartheid. At the end of 1976, Botha chaired a special Cabinet Commitee investigating the possibility of constutional change. His report in 1977 recommended an elected executive presidency and separate parliaments for Whites, Coloureds and Asians.
P. W. Botha was elected Prime Minister of South Africa in 1978 during the Information scandal (also known as Muldergate) that eventually destroyed the careers and reputations of Prime Minister John Vorster, the most likely successor, Connie Mulder; Hendrik van den Bergh,the head of Boss, the South African Secret Service; and Eschel Rhoodie, the Secretary of Information. After a closely fought leadership campaign, which opponents likened to a military coup, Botha came to power as the head of a divided NP. Profound tensions existed between the verkramptes, who wanted a return to the rigidly doctrinaire application of apartheid. and the verligtes, who believed that the ideology should be adapted to suit changing circumstances. Botha was numbered among the verligtes despite his muscular image as Minister of Defence. The ideological differences proved intractable and in March 1982 Dr Andries Treurnicht, the leader of the Transvaal NP, established the Conservative Party with 16 MPs. The broedertwis (brotherly conflict) had been exacerbated by Botha’s proposals to allow Coloured and Asian representation in a tricameral Parliament.
Botha rewarded the South African Defence Force (SADF) with a posioned chalice. While the defence budget grew exponentially during both his period as Defence Minister and later as Prime Minister/President, he also expected the military to become involved in South African politics. Preaching “hearts and minds” while waging war at home and in neighbouring countries was never likely to be a recipe for success. Meanwhile, the Military Intelligence Division dominated South Africa’ s international intelligence gathering. For every success such as the meeting with Margaret Thatcher at Chequers in 1984 or the Nkomati Accord (of the same year) under which Mozambique agreed not to allow the African National Congress to operate from its territory and the South Africans undertook to withdraw support for Renamo, there was a multitude of brutal interventions in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Lestotho, Botswana and Angola which achieved little. Nicknamed Piet Wapens (Weapons) by NP colleagues during his tenure as Minister of Defence, Botha’s enemies in the Department of Information called him Pangaman (Macheteman), “because you never knew when he was going to lash out at you”.
His standing as a reformist leader at home and abroad disintegrated as the violence, that erupted in the African townships in late 1984 spread throughout the country. In July 1985, Botha declared a partial state of emergency, which in June 1986 was extended to a full state of emergency. As the South African economy collapsed after the Chase Manhattan Bank’s refusal to roll over its loans and the rand lost half its value against sterling, it became obvious to informed observers that the apartheid state would be forced to negotiate with the African opposition. Botha refused to lift the bans on the major African political organisations, the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress, and insisted that they must renounce violence before there could be any question of negotiation or the release of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues.
In addition to the brutal police action that was required to control the insurrection in the townships, the Government instituted press censorship and large-scale detention without trial. Tens of thousands of people were subjected to the full brunt of apartheid justice. Meanwhile, apartheid death squads targeted individuals. One State Security Council document, later discovered by Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) researchers revealed that in July 1985: “The chairman (Botha) points out that he is convinced that the brain behind the unrest situation is situated inside South Africa, and that it must be found and destroyed.”
In May 1986 a delegation of Commonwealth notables, known as the Eminent Persons’ Group, visited South Africa, hoping to facilitate negotiation. The group left South Africa without meeting the President, however, amid rumours of a split between doves and hawks in the Cabinet. While the group was still in Cape Town, the SADF launched raids on neighbouring Commonwealth states. Within months, the United States passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and sanctions packages were also adopted by Britain, the Commonwealth and the European Community.
Towards the end of 1987 it became clear that Botha was facing critical choices in his regional policy. The SADF, which had invaded Angola on numerous occasions during the 1980s to bolster Jonas Savimbi’s Unita against the Cuban-supported Angolan MPLA government, reached an impasse at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Realising that sanctions had finally had their effect (South Africa had lost air superiority) and that the SADF was risking the loss of many white soldiers, Botha opted for peace, reportedly on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis. Under pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union, South Africa and Angola sought a diplomatic resolution to the Angolan war.
Botha has rarely received praise for his attempts to reform apartheid but it was under his leadership that the South African state abolished the pass laws which restricted the movement of Africans in the country, legalised interracial marriages, and gave the nod to the formation of black trade unions. But he remained contradictory until the end: in February 1988, seventeen anti-apartheid organisations were banned. Three months later, the first formal meetings between the imprisoned Mandela and a government team of negotiators started in Pollsmoor prison.
On 18 January, 1989, Botha suffered a mild stroke and was advised by his doctors to rest for six weeks. Members of his family insist to this day that he was poisoned by a member of his own Cabinet. A few weeks later Botha took the country, and even his closest colleagues, by surprise when he sent a message to the National Party’s parliamentary caucus announcing that he ws resigning as party leader. He intended, however, to retain his position as State President. It was a situation designed for disaster and following the election of F. W. de Klerk, the NP voted in favour of the leader of the party occupying the office of the State President. Botha grudgingly accepted that he would retire after the general election in September 1989 but after a five-month sulk, he appeared on South African television to announce that, since he was being ignored by his Cabinet, he had no choice but to resign. In the midst of this extraordinary interregnum, Botha met Mandela. The two leaders claimed to like each other, Botha later commenting that he believed that Mandela was a communist but he respected him as a gentleman and a Xhosa chief.
Botha retired to the aptly named Wilderness near his former constituency of George. He rarely granted interviews and managed to avoid facing the consequences of his actions in power.
Pieter Willem Botha, first State President of South Africa, 1984-1989, was born on January 12, 1916. He died on October 31, 2006, aged 90