PROLOGUE TO PROF FANIE CLOETE’S INSIGHTS (SHARED FROM HIS CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVE) REGARDING SOUTH AFRICA’S TURBULENT TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY.
By Dr Willem Steenkamp
NONGQAI, being dedicated to preserving the proud history of South Africa’s forces, has a natural tendency to view and present our country’s history from a security perspective. This may inadvertently lead to a perpetuation of the “silo visions” that had so often plagued strategic decision making on the government side during the era of the “armed struggle”, leading up to the eventual negotiated constitutional settlement.
It is therefore with great appreciation that we welcome the contribution made in this Special Edition of “The Men Speak” by Prof Dr Fanie Cloete of Stellenbosch, towards enabling a broader understanding of the spectrum of viewpoints that had reigned during that time. What Prof Cloete does by sharing his recollections (he was Chief Director of Constitutional Planning during the eighties) is to highlight how the “civilian” departments – in other words, not part of the security and
intelligence establishment – had with great clarity identified the need for fundamental change and had proposed plans to achieve that. Such as the “Skrik vir Niks” (fear nothing) proposals of 1987, signed off by twenty-one civilian departments. Only to have their efforts stymied, in their view, by the then “security establishment” as dominated by PW Botha and the “total onslaught” adherents in the military. Whose suffocating grip was only overcome when FW de Klerk came to power.
I have often shared my view that “the truth” is a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted thing. Like with a well-cut, highly polished diamond, what you see depends very much on the angle of the light that illuminates a particular side of the diamond – meaning, that to appreciate it in full, it needs to be illuminated from all angles. Prof Cloete’s contribution here illuminates those historic debates of the eighties from a very important angle which those in the “security” ambit need to take note of, in order to understand the full scope of what actually had occurred.
It is a common misconception that the security establishment under PW Botha was this monolith marching along in lockstep, with all adhering to the exact same view of “reality” and unified in their pursuit of a singular strategy. It is further fondly believed that this supposedly homologous security establishment so dominated within government that all strategic thinking (also within the civilian departments) conformed exactly to the views espoused by the military circle around PW Botha and Magnus Malan. Prof Cloete’s recollections show that, as regards how the civilian experts thought, as opposed to how the “total onslaught” brigade viewed things, a vast chasm in reality existed.
Other contributions in this series (NONGQAI’s “The Men Speak”), such as by Prof Tony Turton and me, show that even within the security and intelligence establishment very divergent views existed (despite the PW Botha efforts to coerce all into one drill line). This is the great benefit of being able now to read the unfiltered recollections of those who had been in positions to observe those inner workings, beset as those processes were at the time by inter-personal and inter-departmental conflicts, agendas, and silo-type strategic visions.
A homogenous monolith it certainly was not!
NONGQAI readers will know by now that most intel-community members (other than Military Intelligence) such as Foreign Affairs, the National Intelligence Service and leading SA Police Security Branch officers such as my own father had from the mid-eighties already been stressing to the PW Botha government that engaging in negotiations was the only viable strategy. Thanks to Prof Cloete’s recollections here, we can now add the pro-change views which 21 civilian departments had expressed in their “Skrik vir Niks” proposal. It is thus ever more evident that the “lost decade” between the bloodless coup against premier Vorster and the advent of negotiations under FW de Klerk, needs to be ascribed to the stifling, aggressively domineering reign of PW Botha. The majority consensus had in fact favoured fundamental change and been against the “total
onslaught” strategy but was so dominated by those who dictated it (with the officials and senior politicians so much in fear of the “Groot Krokodil”) that only PW Botha’s removal from power at last allowed common sense to prevail.
These multi-faceted dimensions of the complex truth about our history are only illuminated when those such as our valued contributors now share with us their unvarnished recollections of what really had been going on, behind the scenes, during those turbulent times. In putting pen to paper, I believe that they are rendering an invaluable service to our readers, as well as to future generations who may want to research and understand what really happened, and why, during those important times.
Thank you, Prof Cloete, for a very readable, enlightening and highly valuable contribution to preserving our history.
PURSUING POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION DESPITE STRONG SECURITY RESISTANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA: 1980 - 19921
By Fanie Cloete2 - February 2025
Emeritus Professor of Public Management and Governance Universities of Johannesburg and Stellenbosch
1 Updated and expanded extracts from Cloete (1991 and 1992)
2 Fanie Cloete is a former political and constitutional researcher for the Theron Commission and former Head of Constitutional Planning in the South African government. From 1974 to 1989 he was intimately involved in the initiation, planning, implementation, management, coordination and monitoring of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. He is now Emeritus Professor of Public Management and Policy Studies at the Universities of Johannesburg and Stellenbosch. He has published numerous books, peer reviewed articles and other scholarly and popular contributions on different aspects of these topics. He is also a media commentator on public affairs. He is currently engaged in a critical assessment of various aspects of the political transition from apartheid to democracy during the stormy 1980s in South Africa. More details about his background are available at www.faniecloete.wordpress.com. He can be contacted at cloetegs@gmail.com
1 INTRODUCTION
The 1980s and 1990s in South Africa were volatile and traumatic for many people. The country changed from a comprehensive closed political system of white minority domination in all areas of society to a more open and more democratic political system within which effective political rights, freedoms and opportunities for participation in the political process were systematically and constitutionally extended to all South African citizens.
The political changes during this period initiated a systematic weakening of apartheid which facilitated the eventual paradigm shift to the post-apartheid South Africa. Central in these developments was the role of the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning (DCDP) which was created in 1982 and underwent various structural, functional and cultural changes during this process.
2 ORIGINS OF THE DCDP
The establishment of the DCDP was the result of an administrative rationalisation programme which was launched in 1978 by the Commission for Administration at the request of the then new Prime Minister, P W Botha (Cloete 1982a:81). The rationalisation programme comprised various aspects, including an organisational restructuring of the role of the public sector in the RSA. This in turn included streamlining the central planning and decision-making machinery: the Cabinet, Cabinet Committees and the Office of the Prime Minister. It also included a more purposeful distinction between the spheres of activity of the central public service, provincial administrations, parastatal institutions and the private sector by means of function-centred enquiries, deregulation and privatization.
The primary motivation for this rationalisation process was billed by the NP government as a pragmatic approach to improve administrative efficiency and economic cost-effectiveness in the management and governance of the country. However, this process of executive and administrative rationalisation at various governmental levels was even more importantly also aimed at an attempt to stabilise internal political unrest among citizens of colour by designing a more acceptable form of political representation in governance processes for those communities.
3 PHASE 1: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, 1980-1982
In 1978 a formal Cabinet Secretariat was established at the initiative of Prime Minister PW Botha who had just taken over that position from his predecessor, BJ Vorster. The purpose of the new structure was to ensure more effective record-keeping, communication, implementation and coordination of Cabinet decisions. Five permanent interdepartmental Cabinet Committees and Working Groups were also created for National Security (the State Security Council - SSC), Finances, Constitutional, Economic and Social Affairs (see Du Plessis 1980:115) and Geldenhuys and Kotze, 1983). The various state departments were permanently represented on those Working Groups and Cabinet Committees where their activities would be discussed. The rationalized Office of the Prime Minister had to play an important overarching, or macro-planning and co-ordinating role in this regard (Van Rooyen 1981:10 and Du Plessis 1980:119).
In October 1980, five planning branches which largely corresponded to the new inter-departmental Cabinet Committees were created in the Office for Economic, Physical, Social, Constitutional and Scientific Planning. Some of these branch heads also served as ex officio chairs of the corresponding Cabinet Committee Working Groups for a short time and were appointed asmembers of the relevant Cabinet Committees (Du Plessis 1980:116). The result was that the micro-planning and implementation of policy which occurred in the different executive departments could for the first time be effectively co-ordinated at the highest level. Contradictions and overlapping of activities among departments were supposed to have been reduced or eliminated in this manner. The single exception was the SSC, chaired by PW Botha himself as Prime Minister, with a full-time secretariat from August 1981, the SSSC, which undertook security planning.
The planning branches had to initiate further macro-planning and advice to the Government about matters within their respective fields. Co-ordination with the executive departments occurred informally or in Working Groups and Cabinet Committees. The Branches of Physical, Economic and Scientific Planning also had to serve as the administrative underpinning for respectively the Planning, Economic and Scientific Advisory Councils of the Prime Minister (see also RSA, Office of the Prime Minister 1980 and 1982). The fact that the different planning branches were part of the Office of the Prime Minister made the co-ordinating action with other departments easier and lent legitimacy and authority to the activities of these branches. The SSSC, however, operated separately and autonomously parallel to the other planning branches, with little or no communication between it and the rest of the planning branches.
For the first time relatively large numbers of people with relatively high academic qualifications were also recruited on a large scale from universities, research institutions and the professions to staff the new planning units (RSA, Office of the Prime Minister 1982:4).
Constitutional initiatives in which the Branch of Constitutional Development, later the Chief Directorate of Constitutional Development (CDCD)3, was involved during this time, included the planning and formulation of a set of constitutional guidelines which were adopted by Cabinet. In July 1982, these guidelines also laid the foundation for the rest of the constitutional and political reforms in the country (RSA, Department of Foreign Affairs and Information, 1982). In addition, guidelines for a Confederation of Southern Africa were developed on the instruction of Cabinet (Breytenbach 1982 and Cloete 1982(b)). The functions of this Branch will be discussed later in more detail.
During this phase the Office of the Prime Minister was thus a small but comprehensive planning organization without any executive powers which spanned all facets of government policy, with the exception of security.
4 PHASE 2: 1ST DCDP: 1982-1985
Control of the planning branches was in August 1982 transferred to Minister Chris Heunis, then Minister of Internal Affairs, in a new DCDP. This meant that integrated macro-level planning and advisory inputs in all policy sectors except for the security sector were channelled to the Government mainly through him. This new cabinet portfolio earned him the nickname the ‘Minister of Everything’.
In this first guise, the DCDP consisted of the former Branches of Economic, Physical, Social, Constitutional and Scientific Planning as well as the Central Statistical Services (the old Department of Statistics) and a new executive component, the Directorate (also later Chief Directorate) of Constitutional Promotion (RSA, DCDP 1983:21). This unit was the only formal executive unit in the Department. The most important reason for the establishment of this new Department was the high priority which the Government attached to an urgent programme of purposeful planning, negotiation and implementation of the constitutional guidelines which had been announced two days earlier. It is also clear that the process of reform was at that stage already seen as a comprehensive process in all areas of society. Constitutional reform would thus not occur in isolation:
3 The author was appointed as a Constitutional Planner in the new CDCP in 1981 and left that unit as its Head in 1987.
"Instability follows when reform is undertaken which does not take account of the balance between areas of interest. Raising only the level of political participation or only the level of education or restricting it to specific groups, cannot promote stability. Political reform must be co-ordinated with progress and development in the areas of spiritual and social welfare, as well as in the area of material welfare" (PW Botha during the Good Hope Conference in 1981 - RSA, Department of Foreign Affairs and Information 1981:28).
The implementation of reform in the economic, physical, social and scientific spheres still occurred by means of the respective executive departments within the framework of the overarching macro planning proposals formulated by the respective planning units in the DCDP. Examples of planning projects completed during this time are the establishment of the State President's Committee on National Priorities, a Regional-Economic Development Programme, the revision of the National Physical Development Programme, a Social Development Programme, a Community Development Programme, a National Population Development Programme, an Urbanization Strategy and a Scientific Policy and Development Programme for the RSA. This variety of projects illustrates the comprehensive initiatives launched during the first three years of this new Department's existence (see RSA, DCDP 1983, 1984 and 1985).
The most important political transformation activities in which the CDCP was involved during this phase, include:
• Planning, formulating, negotiating and executing the Constitution,1983.
• Enquiry into and planning of a comprehensive re-division of government functions at all government levels under the leadership of the Commission for Administration and in cooperation with various interested parties (Cloete 1983).
• Planning and monitoring the operationalization of the new Parliament, Ministers Councils and Own Affairs Administrations in co-operation with all interested parties (see Malherbe 1984 and 1985).
• Planning and negotiation of provincial reform and the formulation of the Provincial Government Act in co-operation with various interested parties.
• Planning and negotiation of various aspects of local government for the purposes of enquiries by the Council for the Co-ordination of Local Government Affairs.
• Planning of government policy on power sharing with black South African citizens (including the planning of matters such as the involvement of blacks in, and the necessary adjustments to, political processes and structures, citizenship, etc - see Breytenbach 1983).
• Acting as the secretariat of the Special Cabinet Committee (SCC) on the constitutional position of black people (see Breytenbach 1985).
• Establishment and execution of statutory measures to abolish the Prohibition of Political Interference Act, 1968 in co-operation with the Chief Directorate: Constitutional Promotion.
The implementation of the above political reforms occurred through the new Chief Directorate: Constitutional Promotion in order to co-ordinate and promote the practical application of the constitutional proposals through initiating the institution of constitutional systems and structures (RSA, DCDP 1984:21).
The CDCP commenced its work by commissioning or developing a series of comparative research projects, policy analyses and various alternative policy scenarios containing pros and cons of each policy option. A full spectrum of options (from far left to far right) was normally analysed and evaluated. Based on these findings, proposals for policy changes were drafted by the appropriate section and presented to Cabinet for consideration, either before or after negotiations by Heunis with interest groups and his colleagues. The eventual policy decisions reflected, however, the value biases and preferences of the decision makers in Cabinet themselves. Other ministers who were the most influential in the process of political reform included Pik Botha, FW de Klerk and Gerrit Viljoen.
Virtually all political reform measures since 1981 came about in this way (see Cloete 1988a). The heads of the respective planning units in the DCDP for some time also chaired the permanent working groups of the corresponding Cabinet Committees (political, economic/financial, social and security), and were permanent members of those Cabinet Committees. The working groups were at that stage the formal channels of communication to and from Cabinet.
During the three years of phase 2, constitutional changes of an unprecedented nature and scope were made to the South African political system because of activities within the DCDP, as is apparent from the above overview. The planning structure which was adopted from the Office of the Prime Minister was supplemented with a fully-fledged constitutional executive component. This
enabled the Department to execute guidelines for reform on behalf of the government and to launch a co-ordinated programme of action which, for political and practical considerations, systematically and consecutively involved all government levels and all population groups: This entailed the following programme:
• The first step was to negotiate and implement as fast as possible a restricted degree of power sharing among white, coloured and Indian communities on ‘general’ affairs, together with selfdetermination of each group's ‘own’ affairs at national level (Parliamentary representation - 1983) (Cloete 2021). Although the CDCP advised Cabinet that deliberately leaving out Blacks in the new system would be politically very risky, Cabinet deliberately left them out. The reason for this short-sighted decision was that Cabinet did not at the time want to extend the numerical formulae underlying the Tri-Cameral Parliament for the White, Brown and Indian communities, also to blacks. That would have caused the whites-only NP at the time to lose control of government. Cabinet therefore refused to include them. In July 1982 an ideological policy breakthrough was achieved when the governing party, after 34 years in power, finally accepted the principle of political power-sharing with other racial groups. It was, however, only a limited degree of powersharing among the White, Indian and "Coloured" communities in the country with details of only the national political level announced at that time (Botha 1982). In 1984 the Tri-Cameral Parliament comprising these three groups, was established.
• The second step was to make the underlying principles on which the constitutional model for white, coloured and Indian communities was based at the national level (self-determination of own affairs, power-sharing on general affairs, consensus decision-making as far as possible and the elimination of discrimination), also explicitly applicable to black people, while the formulae how this would be done were still under consideration (policy statements by the State President on 25 January 1985 (Parliament), 19 April 1985 (House of Assembly), 15 August 1985 (NP Congress, Port Elizabeth) and 31 January 1986 (Parliament).
• The third step was the creation of a system of restricted power-sharing among all races at local level. This third step was the culmination of several earlier preparatory steps. They included the creation of the Local Government Co-ordinating Council in 1983 as an instrument at the national level to make effective co-ordination and negotiation on changes at the local government level possible between all communities. This led to an additional mechanism to establish power sharing among all communities (including black people) at the local level (regional services councils 1984/5). The first draft of the RegionalServices Councils Billat the end of 1984 excluded blacks. However, political resistance forced the government, to reconsider. The bill was
withdrawn and re-issued early 1985, now including blacks. The policy announcement by the State President on 25 January 1985 to extend the principle of power-sharing to blacks was the determining factor in this case.
This led to more supplementary steps to ensure that the same local government standards, principles and prescriptions would apply to white, coloured, Indian and black communities who have self-determination over their own affairs (viability criteria, delimitation of boundaries, training, remuneration of town clerks, and so on - 1984/5). Furthermore, white local authorities were obliged to consult Coloured and Indian communities in their areas on matters affecting them, until all the involved parties had reached agreement on more effective participation (prescriptions on improvement of communication and expansion of management bodies' powers - 1984/5).
• The fourth step was to reform the provincial government level in line with the adjustments at the other levels. As a result of fierce political opposition to opening up the whites-only Provincial Councils to other races, primarily from the Transvaal NP (at the time under the leadership of FW de Klerk), all the provincial councils were abolished and replaced with a new multi-racial executive system only. This strategy largely defused the intense political resistance among whites to restricted power-sharing at legislative level in the provinces. A joint decentralized administrative and executive structure in which there is power-sharing among all communities on general affairs, including black communities, was duly negotiated with all tri-cameral partners (and only moderate black leaders civic leaders), at central and provincial levels, and implemented (the Provincial Government Act, 1986).
These constitutional reforms were supplemented by the overarching planning initiatives of the other planning directorates/services in the Department, as briefly mentioned above (Du Plessis 1983). The most serious shortcomings of this programme, however, were that -
• It was a top-down programme which did not consider free Black community participation in these programmes at all, despite very strong pressure from members of the DCDP.
• It therefore did not have any significant legitimacy among Blacks at grass-roots levels in the country; and
• it caused spontaneous uproar and resistance among government opponents to such an extent that a permanent state of emergency was established in 1986 to maintain law and order in South Africa. This was aggravated by the Rubicon fiasco (Cloete 2019).
5 PHASE 3: 2ND DCDP: 1985-1986
The executive character of the DCDP during phase 2 was largely restricted to an overarching, initiating, co-ordinating, monitoring and secretarial role as is apparent from the preceding section.
A tendency towards more executive functions for the DCDP started in September 1985 when all government functions affecting black people outside the self-governing regions in the RSA, which at the time were still the responsibility of the Department of Co-operation and Development (with certain exceptions), were transferred to the Department from 1 September 1985. This included the following functions:
• Overarching control over development boards and black local authorities (including the founding and planning of towns, housing, rent and freehold).
• Overarching policy on influx control by development boards.
• Aspects of social development and pensions of black people, and
• Planning and operation of constitutional relations with the self-governing regions.
The DCDP's involvement in the planning of the future constitutional accommodation of black people outside the self-governing states was clearly an important consideration in the decision to transfer these functions to the relevant Department. A further factor was probably the policy guideline that the same principles, policy, standards, structures and processes regarding joint affairs should apply to all involved. The transfer of these functions was a logical step in the light of the purposefulness with which the Government implemented its political reforms.
The organizational changes from September 1985 resulted in a further important shift of emphasis in the activities of the DCDP. Three of the non-constitutional planning directorates were transferred to other line function departments: Social Planning to the Department of National Health and Population Development; Scientific Planning to National Education and the Central Economic
Advisory Service (previously Economic Development) as well as the Central Statistical Services, to the Office of the State President.
The original concept of integrated planning within one department was thereby abolished since only Constitutional and Physical Planning now remained with the DCDP. Interdepartmental co-ordination of planning was still attempted via the new Welfare Management System in the Office of the State President (RSA, Office of the State President 1985). However, this was relatively unsuccessful, because interdepartmental co-ordination can never be as effective as intradepartmental coordination.
The result of all the above shifts in functions were that the DCDP was now an ordinary executive department, with overarching control over all internal physical and constitutional matters regarding all population groups. This situation placed the DCDP in a very powerful policymaking position in government, especially in view of the top-down style of planning which the cabinet has engaged in (against the recommendations of some members of that department).
Increasing political unrest among all communities of colour against the continuation of this discriminatory political system delayed any significant progress in the DCDP and especially in the SCC towards finding a generally accepted solution to improve the racial discrimination still inherent in the Tri-Cameral parliamentary system and the extension of political rights also to blacks (Cloete 2019). The SSC under PW Botha took an extremely hard line towards the maintenance of law and order and was abused by PW to overrule even Cabinet decisions. The military and police forces started to operate more autonomously as rogue, vigilante units, under the direction of their senior officers.
6 PHASE 4: THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT SERVICE (CDS): 19861989
A State of Emergency was declared on 12 June 1986 and since then renewed every year until it was finally lifted during 1990. This stifled attempts at negotiation with the government’s extraparliamentary opposition because many of their leaders were detained or their activities restricted. Law-and-order inclined "securocrats" replaced reform inclined "technocrats" as main advisors to key decision makers within government.
Phase 4 of the development process of the DCDP took shape in the period July to November 1986 when the Department's executive functions were again drastically reduced and the constitutional
component of the Department was transferred to an autonomous agency within a new Department of Development Planning (DDP), the Constitutional Development Service (CDS) (RSA, DDP 1987).
On 1 July 1986 various events of constitutional importance which were all initiated by the 2nd DCDP, occurred:
• Influx control was abolished from that date.
• The white provincial councils were abolished and a new constitutional system at the provincial level came into operation, consisting of an Administrator and executive committee who represented all population groups in every province, and who were appointed by the State President.
• On this date all black community councils were transformed into various degrees of fully-fledged local government institutions under the direct control of the various Provincial governments and were no longer under the control of development boards.
• Development boards were simultaneously abolished and their remaining functions regarding the physical development of black communities were transferred to the relevant new provincial administrations until they could later be devolved to regional services councils.
• The Transvaal Board for the Development of Peri-Urban Areas was abolished, and its functions were transferred to the Transvaal Provincial Administration; and
• business and industrial areas and public facilities such as theatres and restaurants were increasingly opened under the guidance of the DCDP.
The first comprehensive decentralization of central government functions to the provincial level occurred on 1 October 1986 when the following functions which had been carried out by the DCDP were transferred to the relevant provincial administrations:
• Direct control of the management of local government in black communities as well as the physical development of those communities, squatter control and the management of freehold and ownership schemes. This means that local government for all communities was now controlled by provincial administrations, and
• the issuing of permits to white, coloured and Indian people in accordance with the Group Areas Act. Provincial differentiation in the application of this law was thereby made possible.
The overarching physical and socio-economic planning components of the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning were transformed into a separate Department of Development Planning (DDP) from 1 November 1986 (including the Decentralization Board). The two Chief Directorates, Constitutional Development and Constitutional Promotion, were transferred to a new restructured agency, the Constitutional Development Service (CDS), which operated autonomously under the leadership of a Deputy Director-General (DDG), Dr Henk Fourie, within the new DDP (RSA, DDP 1987 and 1988). The CDCP was further divided into two separate chief directorates, Constitutional Planning and Development Support. The CDCP’s main focus shifted to the planning and implementation of the joint Executive Authority for KwaZulu and Natal during 19861987, while the Constitutional Promotion chief directorate specifically focused on the promotion and support of the continuing political negotiation process.
On 1 November 1986 the executive control of welfare and pension affairs affecting black people as well as the re-zoning of land for industrial purposes and the reservation of natural areas for conservation purposes or utilization of natural resources were also transferred to the respective provincial administrations. Other government departments were also subsequently reviewed in order to launch similar decentralization actions. Unfortunately, little of these efforts materialised in the end as a result of strong resistance based on vested interests in the cabinet and the respective departments themselves.
These large-scale shifts of functions resulted in the reduction of the number of posts in the DCDP from 1700 to approximately 327. The CDS largely reassumed the original overarching policy making and planning character which it had in phase 2, as the 1st DCDP.
The most important activities in which the CDCP became involved in 1988 were the establishment of free settlement areas and management committees in those areas, the further reform of the local authority system, the granting of greater autonomy to self-governing regions, the planning of regional bodies for black people, the planning of a negotiation forum at the national level and envisaged amendments to the 1983 Constitution to make provision for black Ministers and a Prime Minister.
These activities increasingly, however, had to be carried out as desktop exercises as a result of the State of Emergency which dramatically curtailed the political manoeuvring and negotiating space of the CDCP. Political reform was hampered especially during this period by strong ideological resistance of political and security elites in government against the acceleration of changes. This trend became nearly fatal in 1987/8 when organisations like the United Democratic Front and the Azanian People’s Organisation were banned.
The various ad hoc incremental reforms that were adopted by government during 1982 to 1986 were very fragmented and had no underlying systematic Cabinet vision. They were relatively isolated, reactive attempts to alleviate domestic and international political pressures on the NP, in conflict with the advice of the CDCD. The result was that internal inconsistencies in the content and application of many government policies started to accumulate. This created increasing contradictions among different policies and their application, as well as increasing confusion about what exactly government wants to do. NP supporters increasingly started to question the legitimacy of the apartheid regime and as a result the NP found it increasingly difficult to implement its apartheid policies and thereby pacify their supporters. The CDCD deliberately supported these short-term reactive tactics despite the fact that it was clear that they would need to be supplemented by a more strategic, coherent and consistent political transformation vision in order to succeed. The CDCD therefore designed and followed a deliberate Machiavellian approach in order to fast-track the ideological erosion of apartheid and its implementation, to strengthen a crisis perception in Cabinet and among its supporters and security agencies that the status quo was being challenged increasingly on good grounds and was becoming increasingly untenable. It therefore to change fundamentally and urgently (Cloete 2023).
7 THE SSC AND THE INTERDEPARTMENTAL ‘SKRIK-VIR-NIKS’ PROJECT, 1987-1988
The State Security Council (SSC) was established in 1972 by Botha’s predecessor as Head of Government, Prime Minister Vorster, driven by PW Botha himself, then Minister of Defence (Seegers 1991; Swilling & Phillips). It was largely latent under Vorster, but Botha reactivated it as the controlling body of a National Management System (NMS) when he succeeded Vorster as Head of Government. It was similar to a Cabinet Committee like the Economic, Social and the Special (Constitutional) Cabinet Committee (SCC) that were tasked to advise Cabinet on specific sectoral matters. However, the SSC was created by special statute and therefore had slightly more status than the other Cabinet Committees. Right from the start of its resurrection by Botha, the SSC functioned as an inner ‘kitchen
cabinet’, whose decisions were just rubber stamped by cabinet, because PW Botha chaired both bodies. The security-related Ministers in Cabinet were members of the SSC. They were the Ministers of Defence (Malan), Law and Order (Vlok), Justice (Le Grange and later Coetsee), Foreign Affairs (Pik Botha), Constitutional Development (Heunis) and Finance (Barend Du Plessis). De Klerk, as Transvaal Leader of the NP was also a co-opted member, for specific purposes only. All of them were also SCC members. The SSC had its own Secretariat (SSSC).
One of the biggest obstacles to political change during the apartheid system was the silo approach to government and the undue "culture of secrecy" which permeated government actions at the time. This was aggravated by the confusion and disinformation about the role played by the new National Management System (NMS) in policymaking about political reform (see scholarly studies like Geldenhuys and Kotze 1983, Kotze 1989:184).The NMS originated under a cloak of secrecy as the National Security Management System (NSMS) to mobilise a counteroffensive (a total strategy) against a perceived revolutionary onslaught against the country at all levels of society. Later its character changed into a more open NMS with the primary focus on inter-departmental coordination of information and governmental actions affecting security issues, facilitating logistical support services for line function government departments and providing an efficient two-way information channel to the State Security Council (SSC) on security issues (see Lloyd 1989:9).
The National Security Management System (NSMS) was an informal coordinating body that was established next to but separate from the SSSC, to manage the State of Emergency that existed from 1986 to 1990. It was chaired by the Deputy Minister of Police, who attended SSC meetings as observer. It consisted of two separate branches: a Security Branch consisting of officials from the Departments of Defence, Law and Order and the various Intelligence Services, and a Welfare Branch consisting of officials from all the other departments, the so-called ‘civilian’ departments. The Head of the Welfare Branch was a Deputy Director General in the Office of the President, Martin Koekemoer.
Koekemoer convened a meeting of the management committee of the Welfare Branch in early February 1987 and informed them that the NSMS was concerned about the lack of progress with socio-economic and political reforms in the country. He had been instructed to establish a number of Working Groups to initiate a special, top-secret project, called Operation ‘Skrik-vir-Niks’ (SvN) (‘Afraid-of-Nothing’), within the Welfare Branch to identify strategies to fast-track these programmes of government. The instruction was to think creatively, not be limited by government policy and to aim at achieving real answers in order to make a quantum leap, hence the name “Skrik-vir-Niks”.
The inter-departmental Constitutional Working Group consisted of representatives of the following ‘civilian’ departments: the DCDP, Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Communications, Development Assistance (Black Homelands), provincial government representatives, the Bureau of Information as well as the SSSC. The CDCP was instructed as the lead agency to develop a discussion document for consideration and approval by the Working Group. The other working groups that were established included Manpower, Education, Transport, Economic Funding, Community Service, Culture and Housing.
Given the Working Group’s explicit instructions to be fearless, creative, action-oriented and not necessarily bound by government policy, our proposals went much further than the discussions up to that point in the SSC. The signed report was submitted early in March 1987 and concluded that the only way to avoid a revolutionary bloodbath in South Africa, is to implement a blitzkrieg of immediate strategic reforms. These reforms included the suspension of parliament, the unbanning of political movements, the release of political prisoners, and an interim GNU representing all SA citizens to draft a new constitution based on a number of non-negotiable principles providing for racially fully integrated democratic legislative and executive political power sharing among all South Africans at all levels of government.
These proposals initially stunned the other members of the working group, because they were regarded as unthinkable at that point in time. However, no-one could motivate feasible alternatives to our recommendations, and in the end the 21 senior officials from different ‘civilian’ departments that comprised the working group, unanimously approved the recommendations and signed off the document. They included myself, my colleagues Joh van Tonder and Kobus Jordaan, as well as other staff members in the CDCP and other so-called ‘welfare’ departments.
The Skrik-vir-Niks report was presented to Koekemoer at the end of February 1987. He was shocked by the bluntness with which we had approached highly politically sensitive issues like white end control and black majority rule. However, he undertook to pass it on directly through his line function channels to the President, but he also warned us that PW Botha would probably not be pleased with the report. We never got any formal feedback on the report. Koekemoer just informed us orally after about two weeks that he had sent it to the President, that PW Botha ‘went through the roof’ and wanted to know who the 21 signatories were. He gave the names to the President and on the advice of Dr Jannie Roux, the DG of the Office of the President at the time, then just dropped the issue without tabling it formally via the SSSC in the SSC. Koekemoer also informed us that he was worried about possible backlashes from the President towards the signatories. As far as could be established, though, none of the
signatories experienced any backlash that could be directly linked to the report, except for myself and my colleague Kobus Jordaan, then Director of Constitutional Development Support in the DCDP.
In 1994, however, Koekemoer recalled that PW Botha’s reaction was that it was a good report, but the time was not right for its implementation. This was a more moderate and euphemistic interpretation of what he told us five years earlier. The report was clearly too radical and unthinkable to even formally consider in the extremely conservative and intimidating political climate at the time, as we expected.
It was, however, not the end of ‘Skrik-vir-Niks’. About 18 months later, the legacy of that project as well as our continued attempts to erode the negative impacts of the government’s heavy-handed tactics to suppress the fast-growing resistance against the political deadlock in the country, hit me and my colleague Kobus Jordaan directly. By then, the security establishment were fed-up with our too ‘liberal and radical’ strategies and they eventually forced us from our positions in the department. This is an excellent example of the many manifestations and intensity of political and bureaucratic competition and factionalism that occurred during these politically stormy eighties.
In 1996, just after the new post-apartheid Constitution took effect, another interesting development occurred around the then already passed ‘Skrik-virNiks’ project. The full text of the final version of the report was mailed by a still unknown source to a journalist of the Mail and Guardian newspaper. The paper published an accurate summary of the whistle-blower’s cover letter and of the report itself in its 11-17 October 1996 edition (below) (Edmunds 1996):
8 ROLE OF THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE (NIS) IN THE ‘HORISONTAL TRANSFERS’ OF CLOETE AND JORDAAN, 1987-1988
The still unknown ‘Skrik-vir-Niks’ whistle-blower, who was clearly ‘n high level member of the SvN working group, explained in his cover letter that the mandate for the project was issued by the President personally, and that he appointed Roelf Meyer, at the time Deputy Minister of Law and Order, and Chair of the Management Committee of the State of Emergency, to coordinate the project. He confirmed that the instructions to the project was to try to break through the then existing policy deadlock by thinking creatively, not be limited by government policy and aim to achieve concrete answers to policy problems to achieve a ‘quantum leap’. He also concluded that the working group’s recommendations were ‘beyond NP policy of the day’, and that ‘due to the risks involved in making these recommendations, all the participants had agreed to sign the final document as a symbol of solidarity’.
He further alleged that after having read the Constitutional Working Group Report, Meyer refused to forward it to the President or even discuss it with him, because he did not approve of it and was worried about his own future should he do it. Presumably, this prompted Koekemoer to discuss it himself with Botha. The whistle-blower also alleged that Meyer did discuss the report with Dr Niel Barnard, the Head of NIS, and they agreed with that the President’s view that the report should be ignored, but that the few ‘bad apples’ at the DCDP who were apparently responsible for it, should be ‘followed up’. This sheds more light on the deathly silence that followed the submission of the report, and also sheds light on what occurred about 18 months later with myself and Kobus Jordaan at the CDS. The full text of the letter is as follows (Anonymous 1996):
The whistle-blower’s letter was clearly written by someone familiar with the internal functioning of the SSSC that processed the document. He (it is totally improbably that it was a female, given the strong male domination of all senior constitutional planning activities at that time), also had to be familiar with the assessment of and final decisions about how to deal with the report. We had so far not been able to establish the identity of this whistle-blower.
My observations and experiences with the functioning of the different agencies involved with constitutional matters at the time, make me relatively confident that the whistle-blower was probably a senior official in either the NIS, the SSSC or in the Office of the President himself. This conclusion is based on the inside information that he mentioned about the discussions between Meyer and Barnard, how PW reacted to the whole saga, and the other information about NIS strategies which few people outside these agencies would have been privy to. His motivation for the leak, though, is still obscure after so many years. The accompanying cover letter seems to have been aimed at discrediting the ‘reform-orientations’of Meyer and Barnard. The language used and the tone of the cover letter, however, seem to be critical of Barnard and Meyer’s ‘reform’ foci.
Meyer’s response in 1996 to the M&G report was that he just vaguely remembered the document and his involvement in the project. Given his central role from that point onwards in Constitutional matters, this lapse of memory is difficult to comprehend. Skrik-vir-Niks was all about a crucial constitutional policy exercise that turned out in the end to be very similar if not identical to the end product that he had eventually negotiated as chief negotiator of the NP with the ANC in 1992 already. However, when he came across his table in early 1987, he apparently still refused to believe that it could be part of the solution, and was concerned that he might lose his job if he became involved in it.
It is also interesting to note that De Klerk decided to take a ‘quantum leap’ in December 1989 with his astounding mind-changing announcements on 2 February 1990. The phrase ‘quantum leap’ was, before his use of the term, first and as far as I could remember, only used in the “Skrik-vir-Niks” documentation, three years earlier, in 1987. In an interview with me in April 2019, De Klerk admitted that he was also vaguely aware of the SvN (“Skrik-vir-Niks”) project at the time, but he denied ever having read the report. This statement is also suspect. De Klerk was intimately involved in determining the direction of political change in South Africa during this period, as the above summary of his involvement in the strategic meetings held for this purpose, attests. It is improbable that a copy of the SvN report was not provided to him at the time, either officially or unofficially.
After the abortive experience with SvN, we continued doggedly to tread water in the SCC, while attempting to formalise the establishment of the National Council, despite an escalation in political
violence in the country in the run-up to and after the General Election held on 6 May 1987 (Cloete 2020). Against this background and that of the malaise in the SCC, this initiative was doomed to failure. The election was held three months after the submission of the SvN report to the President. It was preceded by a series of bombs that exploded in all major urban centres, clearly organised by MK to destabilise the upcoming elections. The ANC accepted responsibility for the attacks and government agents attacked ANC offices and safe houses in Maputo and Harare in retaliation. The NP again won the election with a significantly reduced majority and the right-wing Conservative Party replaced the liberal PFP as the official opposition in the white House of Assembly. The day after the election, the COSATU building in Johannesburg was structurally seriously damaged by two bomb blasts4 which later proved to have been caused by a secret security police team.
In July 1987, a number of mainly influential Afrikaner intellectuals met the ANC in Dakar for introductory discussions about a more democratic system for South Africa. They were vilified by PW Botha himself and regarded as traitors to the country. Botha rejected the Dakar initiative because it was initiated and facilitated by the former Leader of the PFP opposition in the (white) Assembly in Parliament, Dr Van Zyl Slabbert and another senior PFP colleague, Dr Alex Boraine. They both resigned from Parliament in January 1986 to pursue exactly this type of extra-parliamentary political initiatives towards the ANC. Another reason for this fierce opposition by Botha against the Dakar project, was because Botha had by then already approved Kobie Coetsee and Niel Barnard’s secret talks about talks with Mandela in prison. Botha was obviously concerned that Slabbert’s Dakar talks might destabilise his Mandela initiative.
It is significant that De Lange, chair of the AB at the time, confirmed that PW Botha suffered a first, relatively slight stroke during July 1987, although in another interview het stated that it was in July 1986 already. The Dakar issue could therefore have been a trigger for this health setback of the President. The CDCP continued during 1987 and 1988 with its planning of possible political transformation policy options that could provide compromise proposals acceptable to all sides of the political rights dispute. Its members also proceeded with attempts to persuade Cabinet to accept and start negotiating a feasible solution with the legitimate leaders of other racial communities. As part of their preparations for these envisaged compromise solutions, confidential contacts were initiated by Jordaan with grassroots leaders active in the MDM/UDF alliance across the country as well as with the ANC leadershipin-exile via President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, with whom Jordaan had a longstanding close personal
4 https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/general-south-african-history-timeline-1980s..
relationship going back to their first meeting and joint projects when both Jordaan and Kaunda were involved in missionary work in Zambia during .
The increasing breakdown of law and order especially in black suburbs and the security services’ increasingly hardline implementation of the state of emergency at the time were not conducive to rational debates and compromises. The violent and undermining vigilante activities by black ops units within the security forces aggravated this paralysing effect on government political decision-making.
Unknown to virtually all political transformation role players in government, Kobie Coetsee, at the time Minister of Justice and Correctional Services, suggested on 14 March to PW Botha (before the Dakar discussions), that he had made contact with Mandela on Robben Island and that he is prepared to start confidential discussions with him. PW agreed (Esterhuyse & Van Niekerk 218:201). Two years later only, in May 1988, Coetsee allowed Barnard to join those discussions and later withdrew from the talks to allow Barnard to proceed on his own, or accompanied by the Commissioner of Correctional Services, Col Willemse and the then Director-General of Home Affairs, Mr Fanie van der Merwe (Esterhuyse & Van Niekerk 2018:199).
These secret talks with Mandela were contrary to existing government policy and also contrary to the Cabinet portfolio system. Neither Coetsee nor Barnard had any formal Cabinet-approved political mandate for it, because that mandate was officially provided to Minister Chris Heunis and his Department, the then CDS. However, both Coetsee and Barnard refused to allow Heunis to join their discussions, obviously with the approval of PW Botha who was at that time already irritated with Heunis’ unacceptable political transformation proposals that he did not like.
At virtually the same time in 1988, after the general election that was held in May that year, PW Botha also moved Roelf Meyer from his position as Deputy Minister of Police to become Deputy Minister of Constitutional Development under Heunis. Barnard and Meyer were contemporaries at the University of the Orange Free State. They knew each other well and were also both members of the executive of the Ruiterwag, the youth wing of the Afrikaner Broederbond.
Only months after Meyer took up his new position at CDS, Barnard, together with some of his top NIS officials informed Meyer and the top management of the DDP and the CDS in October 1988 that the Security Police had cancelled my and my colleague Kobus Jordaan’s ultra secret security clearances, thereby taking away their access to all classified government documents.
This was clearly the ‘follow-up’ that PW Botha instructed Barnard to do, to solve the ‘problem’ at Constitutional Development. This meant that we could not continue in our respective positions as
Chief Director of Constitutional Planning and Director of Constitutional Development Support. The then DG of the DDP, Mr Dougie de Beer and his top management team then informed us accordingly, without divulging what the reasons for these moves were. We were only informed that we had allegedly contravened unspecified government policies and should ourselves be fully aware of what we did.
The DG of Development Planning therefore arranged for us to be removed from those positions in the CDS I was appointed as the new Chief Director of Legal Administration in the DDP while Jordaan was also horizontally transferred to the Chief Directorate Urbanisation and Social Development in the DDP.
Minister Heunis denied any participation in these events. On 30 October 1988 he issued a formal media statement to the effect that he had no reason to doubt our loyalties towards him, his department or the government (Heunis 1988). Later, it emerged that Heunis was just informed by his Deputy, Meyer, of the decision by the Security Police to cancel our security clearances for allegedly contravening government policies by contacting members and/or sympathisers of banned organisations without government approval.
This was correct in the case of Jordaan, a former senior NP Senator and former Commissioner-General in Gazankulu. After completion of his Gazankulu appointment, Jordaan was mandated in 1984 by the then Minister of Cooperation, Development and Education, Dr Gerrit Viljoen as a one-person commission of investigation into the increasing unrest in black urban areas that started out in protest against the establishment of the Tri-Cameral Parliament for Whites, Coloureds and Indians, excluding blacks (Jordaan 1985). This was long before Coetsee and Barnard started to talk to Mandela in prison, between 1986 and 1988).
Jordaan already had wide political, religious and social networks in black communities as a result of his career background and experience at that time. He undertook extensive discussions with grass-roots activists across the country as well as with members of liberation movements in exile abroad. He concluded and recommended that in order to stabilise those communities, major social, economic and political changes in government policies at all levels were urgently needed to address the reasons for the unrest. These recommendations were far-reaching and implied fundamental changes to existing NP policies.
His report, however, was never formally adopted. It was classified as secret and was never publicly released, probably because it implied a fundamental breach of existing policies at the time, which was unacceptable to government. On completion of his report he was for a few months attached to the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Africa Division, before he was recruited as Director of Constitutional Development Support in the CDS, largely as a result of his proven extensive knowledge and experience
of management, governance and negotiations in black communities, as well as his recommendations for political transformation in black communities, based on his 1985 report. He was also appointed as the secretary of the SCC on Constitutional Issues that coordinated political interactions and negotiations with the autonomous black governments of Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana and Venda and the other subordinate black governments in KwaZulu, Gazankulu, Lebowa, KwaNdebele, KaNgwane and QwaQwa as a result of his direct, good relationships with those political leaders.
Jordaan knew Minister Heunis well, as a former NP political colleague of his in Parliament before he was appointed as Commissioner-General in Gazankulu. Shortly after Jordaan’s appointment in the CDS in 1986, he and Heunis agreed on the need to continue reaching out to black leaders and activists sympathetic to the banned liberation movements in order to create a more conducive atmosphere for further potential political negotiations directly with them that has become increasingly inevitable. Heunis, however, informed Jordaan that he could not openly or even in principle approve such activities, because of President PW Botha’s strong refusal to accept the principle of negotiations with any of the banned political movements unless they reject the use of violence to achieve their political ends. He therefore instructed Jordaan to do use his discretion, interact with them in secret about their willingness to formally reject violence, their preferred priorities and strategies for changes and improvements of the status quo, whatever messages they might want him to convey to government, etc, and then to report back to him and to us on his results.
I never accompanied Jordaan on these excursions, but he regularly provided Heunis and his other colleagues with extremely relevant feedback. We used this feedback to adapt our own plans, strategies and advice in the execution of our respective tasks at CDS. Jordaan had a good trust relationship with Mike Louw, Barnard’s deputy at NIS at the time, and regularly also briefed him about his discussions. Louw just listened but did not respond. We can only assume that he did report to Barnard on these issues, and that he was instructed to be non-committal, until Barnard decided to pull the plug on our initiative. According to informal oral feedback from Mike Louw after our security clearances have been withdrawn, he confirmed to Jordaan what led to the cancellation of his clearance. He also informed him that two other factors apparently contributed to the cancellation of my security clearance.
The first factor was apparently my Interactions with Mark Swilling, an activist employed by UrbanPlan, a research NGO sympathetic to the banned liberation movements, whom I suspected was also an undercover member of the ANC. In his capacity as a researcher for UrbanPlan, he reached out to me on a number of occasions since 1986 for clarity on government speeches, statements and responses to different events and developments. I have always maintained an open-door approach to interactions with my staff, colleagues, customers and stakeholders, and still do. I therefore openly talked to him to
try to explain the political transformation process and what was acceptable and not acceptable to government at the time. I also talked to him as a source of information about the dynamics within the liberation struggle, for purposes of our CDCP work. However, Swilling’s phone was apparently already at time being tapped by NIS and they used our discussions to discredit me as ‘talking to the enemy’.
The second additional consideration was apparently my marriage little more than a year previously, in July 1987, to a member of the executive of the Pretoria branch of the Black Sash, a liberal feminist organisation that was also sympathetic towards the banned liberation movements and who openly opposed the refusal of the NP government to provide full political rights to all South Africans irrespective of their racial origins. According to Mike Louw, if my wife would have resigned from the Black Sash, it would have facilitated the final decision about my future. I refused in principle to discuss her position any further with them. I accepted these developments as interim actions and awaited the final outcome.
I was given a new title, office and a secretary and some routine matters to attend to. After three weeks I still had access to all the highly classified documents in my possession. I sorted them out myself and initiated their removal for safe keeping. Nothing further happened. I occupied myself by pursuing a few personal research interests which I never had the time to do earlier.
I realised that NIS also tapped my home communications afterwards, because I was informed by a few guests that I invited at some stage for a braai at my house during 1989, that, returning home, they were followed by ‘agents’ who interrogated them about what happened at the braai, who were there, what were discussed and especially what I talked about. They were also advised to cut contact with me.
Shortly after my suspension and transfer, I was scheduled for my annual merit review for promotion. Up until that time I had consistently received the highest rating every year after a brief personal discussion with the panel (out of turn promotable). After my suspension, the assessment continued in my absence without me being aware that it was continuing, and I was then given the worst possible assessment without my being present or given a chance to give the usual input: non-promotional. No audi alteram partem procedures were followed and the review panel took a decision based on unspecified and unproven allegations. I dropped 5 levels of merit in one go but decided not to contest my suspension, transfer and new merit review. I decided to sit out the new development and see what transpired.
Six months later my situation was still largely the same. I still could not succeed in obtaining more information about the reasons for my transfer and loss of security clearance, and I still had full access to all my files and documents, including all the classified documents. I eventually voluntarily gave the keys of all my locked file cabinets to my secretary to keep safe until someone asked where they were. I
then decided to rather ask for a golden handshake and leave, because I was already too frustrated with our lack of progress with the changes we were tasked with. It was approved within 24 hours. I became a civil service pensioner at the tender age of 39.
Jordaan was recruited in 1989 by the DP to contest the Umhlanga Rocks constituency against Renier Schoeman of the NP and won. He served many years as a senior member of the DP, including Chairperson of the Party, and also a senior member of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Intelligence before he finally retired.
Jordaan and I were never provided with official explanations why the actions against us were taken, and we were never taken to task for our alleged ‘contraventions’ of government policies. However, these developments discredited Chris Heunis’ political career totally, and he never recovered from it. Heunis retired as MP and Cabinet Minister at the end of June 1989, one month after PW Botha’s ouster by FW de Klerk from Cabinet and Parliament, and one month before I retired from the public service with my golden handshake.
Barnard’s strategy to stop our very promising interactions with key members of the banned political movements instead of co-operating and joining forces with both Heunis and us, confirm the level of personal power play and mala fides that drove his as well as PW Botha’s thinking at the time. They decided to sacrifice us as scape goats in order to make it easier to force Heunis to resign, in order to appoint a more conservative minister (Viljoen) and to enable Barnard and NIS to gain direct control over the CDS. The more appropriate political, bureaucratic and ethical strategy that should have been followed was probably to have a formal debriefing from everyone involved to enable the State President to shuffle his Cabinet in the normal manner and to revise and restructure the new, emerging political negotiation approach, after consultation with Cabinet. However, this unfortunately did not happen, and various governmental agencies were abused in an underhanded manner to achieve their personal and political ambitions and goals.
9 PHASE 5: DEPARTMENT OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT, 19891992
Minister Chris Heunis was succeeded in July 1989 by Dr Gerrit Viljoen as Minister of a now again fully-fledged government department called Constitutional Development. Minister Roelf Meyer succeeded Dr Gerrit Viljoen in 1992 as the new Minister of Constitutional Affairs and Communication, with Dr Niel Barnard, former Director-General of National Intelligence, as his new
DG. Barnard then filled all key positions in the renewed department with top NI officials. His internal bureaucratic coup was therefore successfully concluded.
10 OTHER SIGNIFICANT ROLE PLAYERS IN THE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION PROCESS
Proposals for political transformation did not always originate inside the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning. As happens normally with policy changes, they gradually took form as opinions were canvassed across different policy sectors and from different agencies and individuals. Through research, consultations, negotiations, and other interactions with different stakeholders, policy constraints became clearer, and people's bottom lines were drawn. Many diverse inputs were received from other participants in the policy process, individuals and interest and pressure groups from outside the DCDP.
Legal draughtsmen from the Department of Justice assisted planners from the DCDP in shaping and refining rough drafts of reform legislation and identified in this way a mass of technical detail which had to be synchronised with the broad principles of reform. Senior officials of Parliament largely influenced the restructuring of the inner workings of the new Tricameral Parliament in collaboration with planners from the DCDP. In joint planning and working sessions procedural principles and issues were analysed and policy proposals drafted for consideration by the decision makers concerned.
The research undertaken by the President's Council (PC) on a new political system for South Africa were also influential inputs into the political decision-making process, and assisted Cabinet to make up their minds as to which direction they wanted to go. The principles of the PC's recommendations in favour of an executive Head of State, a consociational type of system, decentralisation of power and a coordinating, advisory body for local government were later incorporated in the government's reforms. A close liaison also existed between the planning sections of the DCDP and the corresponding committees of the PC.
The Commission for Administration (CfA) directly influenced the shaping of the administrative system underlying the Tricameral Parliament and subsequent rationalisation measures like the abolition of outdated development bodies. It also determined the scope and operation of own and general affairs and implemented the government's policy of a decentralisation of power to lower levels of government and privatisation of certain functions. Policy decisions about these matters
were planned and formulated by a special interdepartmental project team consisting of officials from the Office of the CfA and the Department of Finance, planners from the DCDP, co-opted representatives from other departments and interest groups outside government, where necessary.
The most important interest groups outside government which directly and substantially influenced the contents of political reform policies at national level, were the Labour Party under Alan Hendrickse and the National People's Party under Amichand Rajbansi. They helped to shape the 1983 Constitution into its present form through a series of negotiations with Heunis (supported by planners from his department) during 1982-1984. They also exercised considerable influence on the contents and timing of reform measures mainly by pressuring the NP into putting proposals forward and then insisting on amending or vetoing those proposals they did not like, and which had to be adopted by all three Houses of Parliament in terms of the Constitution. Attempts by the NP to amend the Group Areas Act and to provide for a Prime Minister and Black ministers, failed because of resistance by these groups (see Rautenbach and Malherbe 1989).
The Urban Foundation contributed directly to the abolition of influx control and improvements in the development of and local government in Black communities, through commissioning or undertaking topical applied research projects into viable policy alternatives and utilising very effective lobbying techniques to recommend technical improvements on the basis of these studies, which in the end promoted the change-over to a new system.
Provincial Executive Committees and the cabinets of the respective Self-governing Territories and their officials were directly involved in negotiations with Heunis and planners from his department about the planning and drafting of the Provincial Government Act (1986), the Joint Executive Authority for Kwa Zulu and Natal Act (1986) and the Self-governing Territories Bill (1988). Many of their viewpoints and preferences were incorporated in these measures.
The Council for the Coordination of Local Government Affairs recommended by the PC, was established in 1983. It was representative of all significant interest groups in organised local government in the country. It was chaired by Minister Chris Heunis and its function was to advise Cabinet about all proposed measures affecting local government. The DCDP acted as secretariat for this council. Virtually all reform measures at local governmental level since 1984 originated from applied research initiated by planners from the DCDP and channelled through ad hoc working groups appointed by the council. This included measures like regional services councils, a more uniform municipal system, a board to demarcate municipal boundaries more effectively, a more systematic training system for local government personnel, the abolition of Development Boards for Black communities, decentralisation of powers to local level, deregulation and privatisation of local
governmental activities, etc. Through the council, the various interest groups comprising organised local government were fully involved in all proposed changes to this level of government. They directly affected the contents of policy in this way, although supporters of the banned liberation movements and other opponents of this discriminatory political system refused to participate.
The Permanent Financial Liaison Committee on the finances of local government, (originally the socalled Croeser working group on the implementation of the Browne Report commissioned by the Minister of Finance on local government finances), worked in close cooperation with the Council for the Coordination of Local Government Affairs. It actually initiated the concept of joint provision of services (later regional services councils) before the DCDP and the Coordinating Council itself were established.
The National Party caucus and congresses played a negligible policy making role in this process, as also happened in other instances. Under PW Botha, the caucus and congresses have served mainly as sound boards and legitimating instruments for the views and actions of its political leaders in Cabinet Individual caucus members had to lobby Cabinet members on a personal basis to obtain support for their views. Despite party rhetoric to the effect that policy is "made" by NP congresses, this is, like the caucus, not their function. Similarly, NIS played an insignificant role in these political transformation processes, by only providing what it regarded as selected strategic and tactical information about developments in the policy implementation process.
The Afrikaner Broederbond (AB) also played only a peripheral political socialising role in this regard. Those policy actors who were also members of the Broederbond utilised that organisation in a way similar to the manner in which the NP caucus was used by the NP elite: for purposes of policy legitimation and political education of Afrikaners about the government's objectives. New ideas which took government policy some logical steps further, were also floated under the banner of the Broederbond in attempts at political reconnaissance. The AB proved to be a useful instrument for this legitimation and education purpose, and was under the leadership of Prof Pieter de Lange, willing to take reform even further and faster than the government was prepared to do (Stals 2021).
Formrly restricted organisations like the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, the Pan-Africanist Congress and the so-called Mass Democratic Movement which opposed all government reform activities, did not exercise as direct an influence on political policy making within government (Cloete 2019). At most they exerted indirect pressure at a macro level on the decision making system by forcing the government to act against them through security actions, by increasingly constraining the parameters within which the government can operate (eg by the
international isolation of the country at various levels), and by confirming the realisation in the minds of the NP government elites that more substantial changes should be brought about.
The most important conclusion to be drawn from the analysis so far, is that the main policy actors involved in political changes in the Botha regime, consisted of a loose and informal alliance of reform orientated individual political and technocratic elites in the Ministry and DCDP with the support and cooperation of only a few likeminded Cabinet members and officials in other civic departments. They operated under pressure to change faster and more substantially from various interest groups outside government (Cloete 1988a). Although under severe ideological constraints they operated relatively autonomously (independently) from the control of the political masses but sensitive to inputs from their political environment.
11 CONCLUSIONS
A purposeful process of constitutional policy planning initiated a change in South Africa during the first half of the eighties which in future probably will be typified as the beginning of a meaningful paradigmatic shift in the dominant South African political culture, structures and processes.
As a result of a coincidental convergence of favourable circumstances, it was possible to initiate, in an evolutionary manner, and in a relatively short period, a series of basic political and constitutional reforms which eroded apartheid and caused internal dissonances in the existing social order. The implications of the acceptance of the principle of power-sharing between all communities and the abolition of certain statutory economic, social and political cornerstones of the current social order, resulted in certain contradictions which of necessity had to be reconciled (Huntington 1981:16). These reforms had an important and unavoidable "snowball effect" on the survival of old outdated values and customs.
In the process of policy change from "Apartheid' or "Separate Development" to "Power-sharing" the DCDP in general, and minister JC Heunis and the CDCP in particular, played a prominent role. The latter owed its existence to the administrative rationalisation programme of the late seventies. The activities in which the CDCP had been involved were fundamentally an extension of the original rationalisation programme to a more comprehensive political rationalization programme. The process was accompanied by social instability, conflicting behaviour and differences of opinion on the direction and pace of change within Cabinet and different government departments and agencies.
These reforms failed in the end by not according to the government the degree of legitimacy which it seeked from the black community in the country. The main reasons for this failure are relatively obvious: the NP refused to accept the sound advice of Heunis, the CDCP, Pik Botha and a few other transformation-orientated Cabinet Ministers to increase the scope and tempo of their reforms. Conservative politicians, bureaucrats, especially in the armed forces and police, most prominently in Military Intelligence, the Security Police and NIS, and their supporters within conservative factions of the white community instead slowed down political and social change in a crucial phase. Led by a defiant PW Botha, Magnus Malan, Niel Barnard and numerous other senior police and armed forces officers, they implemented devious, sometimes unethical and illegal tactics and strategies to delay or stop legitimate attempts to increase the nature and speed of ongoing political transformation initiatives in the civic departments of government.
This political resistance to change accelerated the dissonance between new and old values in South African society and also fatally increased the gap between expectations and their fulfilment in black communities, which lead to increasing resistance not only domestically but also internationally. The apartheid regime could not sustain the negative domestic and international political, cultural, social, financial and economic pressures on its system in the end. De Klerk succumbed on 2 February 1990 and accepted the inevitability of a process of political negotiation that eventually led to the establishment of the post-apartheid democratic system.
The constitutional engineers of the nineteen eighties in South Africa attempted to accelerate the process of political transformation in the country by eroding apartheid in various ways as fast as the political decision-makers of the day could be persuaded to change. It was a slow process that faced serious resistance from within and outside of government. Fortunately, common sense prevailed in the end.
12 REFERENCES
Anonymous. 1996. The day that Roelf Meyer (and Neil) Barnard blinked. Unpublished letter in author’s possession.
Breytenbach, WJ. 1982. Konfederasies: 'n Vergelykende oorsig in historiese en kontemporêre perspektief. Development Southern Africa 4(2): 160-179.
Breytenbach, WJ. 1983. Die begrip "Assosiasie" met besondere verwysing na geassosieerde lidmaatskap en geassosieerde staatskap en toepassingsmoontlikhede in Suid-Afrika. Development Southern Africa 5(3): 265-292.
Breytenbach, WJ. 1985. Die problematiek van die politieke akkommodasie van stedelike swart gemeenskappe in Suid-Afrika. Africanus 15(1+2): 53-61.
Cloete, F. 1991. Characterising policy change in South Africa. 1980-1990: The games elites play, in Cloete F, Schlemmer L and Van Vuuren D (eds). Policy options for a new South Africa, HSRC Publishers, Pretoria, 19-45.
Cloete, F. 1992. Engineering the Erosion of Apartheid. Constitutional Policy Planning in South Africa. 1980-1989, in Plural Societies 22(1&2):45-73.
Cloete, F. 1988a: "Die Departement van Staatkundige Ontwikkeling en Beplanning", in Faure, A M et al: Suid-Afrika en die Demokrasie, Owen Burgess, Pinetown, 343-370.
Cloete, F. 2019. Resolving P.W. Botha’s 1985 Rubicon riddle. Historia 64(2):132‐155. https://journals.co.za/content/journal/10520/EJC-1aa008def4
Cloete, G S. 2020. The Complexity and Limitations of Strategic Governmental Policy Change Initiatives in South Africa: 1986–1988. Administratio Publica 28(3):60-80. https://journal.assadpam.net/index.php?journal=assadpam&page=issue&op=viewIssue&pat h%5B%5D=48&path%5B%5D=40
Cloete, F. 2021. Beleidsdiskriminasie, -verandering en entrepreneurskap: Beperkte politieke regte vir “Kleurlinge” in Suid-Afrika tot 1979 (Policy discrimination, change and entrepreneurship: Political rights for “Coloureds” in South Africa, until 1979), Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 61(4-2): 1260-1286. https://journals.co.za/loi/akgees/group/d2020.y2021
Cloete, F. 2023. Die Nasionale Party se Machiavelliaanse strategieë vir demokratisering in die 1980s en 1990s in Suid-Afrika (The National Party’s Machiavellian strategies for Democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s in South Africa). Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 63(2): 262-284. https://journals.co.za/loi/akgees/group/d2020.y2023
Cloete, GS. 1982(a). Rasionalisering vir doeltreffende dienslewering deur die onderskeie owerheidsvlakke aan die verskillende bevolkingsgroepe. In Short Course for senior officials (3-4 June). Port Elizabeth: University of Port Elizabeth.
Cloete, GS. 1982(b). The future of constitutional reform in Southern Africa: South Africa and the realities of regionalisation. Roneo, unpublished paper presented on 6 Augustus at a Conference of AIESEC in Pretoria on South Africa and the European Community.
Cloete, GS. 1983. Handleiding vir die herindeling van owerheidsfunksies. Roneo. Unpublished working document. Pretoria: Department of Constitutional Development and Planning.
Du Plessis, JE. 1980. Administratiewe vernuwing: Beleidsvereistes SAIPA 15(3): 110-122.
Du Plessis, JE. 1983. Beheer en verwesentliking van staatkundige hervorming. SAIPA 18(3): 108118.
Edmunds, M. 1996. Roelf ‘rejected’ reform document. Mail & Guardian, October 11-17, 1996. https://mg.co.za/article/1996-10-11-roelf-rejected-reform-document/ and https://mg.co.za/article/1996-10-11-proposals-that-shocked-pw/
Esterhuyse, W & Van Niekerk, G. 2018. Die Tronkgesprekke – Nelson Mandela en Kobie Coetsee se geheime voorpunt-diplomasie. Kaapstad: Tafelberg.
Geldenhuys, D &: Kotze, H. 1983. Aspects of political decision making in South Africa. Politikon 10(1): 33-45.
Heunis, JC. 1988. Statement issued by Mr Chris Heunis, Minister of Constitutional Development and Planning, on Sunday 30 October 1988. Pretoria.
Jordaan, JA. 1985. Verslag oor die onrus in swart stedelike woongebiede in the Republiek van SuidAfrika, 1984. Ongepubliseerde verslag. Pretoria: Departement van Samewerking, Ontwikkeling en Onderwys.
Kotze, H.1989: "Aspects of the Public Policy Process in South Africa", in Venter, A: South African Government and Politics, Southern, Johannesburg, 170-200.
Lloyd, C. 1989: "Of Hearts and Minds", Weekly Mail, 23-29 June 1989.
Malherbe, EFJ. 1984. Die Grondwet van die RSA, 1983: Samestelling, bevoegdhede, funksionering en toekomstige werkverrigting van die Wetgewende Gesag. Roneo. Paper presented at a symposium of SAIPA on the 1983 Constitution, 28 September in Pretoria.
Malherbe, EFJ. 1985. Grondwet 1983: Strukture vir selfheskikking en medeverantwoordelikheid. Roneo, paper presented at an internal seminar of the Administration, House of Assembly on 8 May in Pretoria.
Rautenbach, IM and Malherbe, EFJ 1989: "Die Grondwet 1984-1989", Tydskrif vir Suid-Afrikaanse Reg.
RSA, DCDP. 1983. Report 1982: Department of Constitutional Development and Planning. RP 36/1983. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, DCDP. 1984. Report 1983: Department of Constitutional Development and Planning, RP 23/1984. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, DCDP. 1985. Report 1984: Department of Constitutional Development and Planning, RP 22/1985. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, DCDP. 1986. Report 1985: Department of Constitutional Development and Planning. RP 18/1986. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, DDP. 1987. Report 1986: Department of Development Planning and the Constitutional Development Service, RP 61/1987. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, DDP. 1988. Report 1987: Department of Development Planning, RP 59/1988. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, Department of Foreign Affairs and Information. 1981. Die Goeie Hoop-plan vir Suider-Afrika. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, Department of Foreign Affairs and Information. 1982. Guidelines for a New Constitutional Dispensation. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, Office of the Prime Minister. 1980. Report 1980: Office of the Prime Minister, RP 115/1980. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, Office of the Prime Minister. 1982. Report 1981: Office of the Prime Minister. RP 23/1982. Pretoria: Government Printer.
RSA, Office of the State President. 1985. Speech by Minister E van der M Louw on behalf of State President P W Botha at the official opening of the Annual General Meeting of SAIPA in Pretoria on 13 Augustus. Pretoria: Roneo, Office of the Prime Minister. Pretoria. Seegers, A. 1991. South Africa's National Security Management System, 1972-90. Journal of Modern African Studies 29(2):253-273.
Stals, E.L.P. 2021. Die Broederbond: Die Geskiedenis van die Afrikaner-Broederbond, 1918-1994. Johannesburg: Die Afrikanerbond.
Swilling, M and Phillips, M. 1989. The Powers of the Thunderbird. Centre for Policy Studies. South Africa at the End of the Eighties. Johannesburg. 29-73.
Van Rooyen, PE. 1981. Die beplanningstaak van die Kantoor van die Eerste Minister. Publico, Desember 1981, 10-13.
