Botha Hit Hard by Party Liberals Pressing for Faster Reform

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  In a rebellion that could reshape South African politics, liberals in President Pieter W. Botha’s National Party are pressing him hard to accelerate the pace of reform, threatening to break away unless the government moves ahead more boldly toward ending apartheid.

Botha, who intended to fight the far right in the country’s approaching parliamentary elections, is now confronted with such serious defections from the left that his policies and his party leadership are being questioned in some Nationalist circles.

One of the party’s most prominent liberal members of Parliament, Wynand Malan, has already quit, declaring that under Botha “reform is dead” and calling for urgent negotiations on a new political system for the country.

A Lost ‘Sense of Purpose’

The South African ambassador to Britain, Denis J. Worrall, another prominent member of the National Party’s liberal wing, resigned in protest over government policies and returned home last month to seek a seat in Parliament, also as an independent on a reform platform.

Two issues must be addressed in the campaign for the May elections, Worrall said, if South Africans are to recover “a sense of purpose and direction and vision.”

“One is a real end to apartheid,” he said, “and the second is proper attention to the granting of political rights to black people, a real mandate that speaks to black South Africa. . . . “

Other Nationalists, among them prominent businessmen, academics, sportsmen, journalists and local party officials, who had until now supported Botha’s program of gradual political reforms aimed at power sharing, have publicly backed these calls for bolder reforms and expressed their strong disappointment with the government. Each day, more announce that they are leaving the National Party.

“I am afraid that the National Party can no longer meet the political aspirations of the South African people as a whole nor provide the vision of a new, united and free country,” said Malan, 43, the son of an old Nationalist family, who quit the party in what he called a crisis of conscience.

The Nationalists had once declared bold principles for reform, Malan said, “but when we had to give meaning to them, we retreated and refused to accept the consequences of what we had said.”

Worrall, 51, a political scientist and constitutional lawyer, was equally critical, accusing the government of destroying the diminished hope that South Africans had for the future of their strife-torn country.

He himself had despaired of progress under Botha and the Nationalists, Worrall told newsmen, when the government rejected a proposal two months ago for a multiracial government in Natal province based largely on the principle of one-man, one-vote, and at about the same time postponed for a year or more reform legislation that would have allowed local communities to desegregate residential neighborhoods.

Faster Reform Sought

Worrall plans to run against J. Christian Heunis, the minister of constitutional reform, whom he holds responsible for the slow pace of reform.

In breaking with the Nationalist leadership, Malan and Worrall have defined the issues for the election, and they hope that they can continue to do so and thus force the party to make a greater commitment to reform.

“One of the realities of the election is that the National Party will be returned to power,” Worrall commented, and thus the only “real option” for government critics on the left, including those such as Malan who are known as the “New Nats,” is to force it into broader and faster political change.

“The government,” Worrall said, “is putting to voters the issue of a mandate, and the consequences of that mandate will be very far-reaching.”

Black militants find these defections interesting, likewise the discussion they cause, Murphy Morobe of the United Democratic Front observed. But, he added, it is all “still part of white politics,” which many blacks suspect is really aimed at preserving minority power and privilege in a different form.

“What we are waiting for are the white politicians to quit that sterile game entirely and come over to the people if they want to participate in building a free, democratic, non-racial South Africa,” Morobe said. “For us, these parliamentary elections remain a great non-event.”

As the separate Malan and Worrall challenges have drawn increasing support, Botha has unexpectedly been faced with what many in the party concede is much broader disaffection within the party than the leadership had acknowledged.

“The feeling that a significant group of voters are now waiting for the next installment of reform grows stronger by the day,” the Johannesburg Afrikaans newspaper Die Vaderland commented, summing up views within the party that has governed South Africa for 39 years.

The danger of “a left-oriented rebellion” seems “a little premature,” Die Vaderland said, but it urged the party to recognize the “concern in its own ranks because the impasse over black politics is simply continuing, because no end to the state of emergency is in sight and because of incidents and actions that offend the human dignity of people of color.”

‘Old Order’ Is Dying

Tertius Myburgh, editor of the Sunday Times and one of the country’s most acute political observers, said the ferment within the National Party gives him the feeling that “for the first time in decades, the old order in white politics is nearing its end.”

The National Party, which has suffered past defections to the far right by conservative Afrikaners, and feared that there would be more by farmers and blue-collar workers, has, according to Myburgh, “suddenly run into equally serious problems among the more affluent, better educated, more reform-minded urban Afrikaners, who can no longer be gulled by unimaginative leaders who simply say, ‘Trust us.’ ”

Even such staunch Nationalists as Willem de Klerk, the editor of the Sunday newspaper Rapport and brother of F. W. de Klerk, the party’s Transvaal provincial leader and a senior member of Botha’s Cabinet, has expressed serious concern over what he sees as the party’s diminished commitment to political reform and its general drift, and warned that, as a result, the party could suffer serious losses in the May 6 election.

Recent opinion surveys by Rapport show that 22% of the party’s supporters are so dissatisfied with the lack of progress on reform that they may well vote for the opposition Progressive Federal Party, for independents like Malan and Worrall, or simply not vote at all.

Although this would not end the Nationalists’ control of the House of Assembly, the white chamber in South Africa’s tricameral Parliament, it would put the party into very tight contests with the Progressives on the left and the Conservative Party on the right, and this could cost it a significant number of seats.

Botha might then be deprived of the firm electoral mandate that he wants in order to begin negotiations with black leaders on a system, so far undefined, for sharing political power among the country’s racial and ethnic groups.

“We could come out of this election losers all around,” said a liberal Nationalist member of Parliament who asked not to be identified by name but who intends to remain in the party. “I can see losses to the far right in constituencies where people oppose any departures from the old-style apartheid, and I can see losses, my own seat among them, in constituencies where people are fed up with P. W. Botha and want change.

‘Worst Scenario’

“That would be the worst scenario, I think, because it would really paralyze us. . . . Whatever strategy was in P. W.’s mind when he decided to call these elections has gone badly askew.”

Stoffel van der Merwe, the deputy minister for information, who is also a prominent member of the Nationalists’ verligte, or liberal, wing, disagrees. He argues strongly the need for a new mandate before substantial negotiations on power sharing and other steps to end apartheid.

Van der Merwe also disputes the frequent contention that the party should look left rather than right, at least as a matter of tactics until the election has been won.

As many as 30% or 40% of Nationalist supporters could be lost to the far-right Conservative and Herstigte Nasionale parties, Van der Merwe says, if the party takes a substantial swing to the left, but it could probably not gain more than half of the center-left vote of 20%.

But the developing fissure on the National Party’s left clearly worries many in the party, and F. W. de Klerk, usually known for his hard-line views, made one of the most reformist speeches at the opening of Parliament in Cape Town last month at the insistence of liberals in the party caucus.

“The National Party has a calling to continue on its road of balanced and orderly reform,” he said. “We will be asking voters not only for a mandate on security measures but also for a mandate to continue reform. . . . The solution (to the country’s current crisis) lies in new plans and thoughts on the basis of acknowledging the realities of South Africa.”

Still, many South African political analysts doubt that Malan, Worrall and the other National Party dissidents will gather much real support.

Hermann Giliomee, a political scientist at the University of Cape Town, said that a great many liberals will continue to support the National Party regardless of whether it emphasizes reform.

A recent survey of students at Stellenbosch University, the country’s leading Afrikaans university and a supposed stronghold of the liberals, showed that 70% of the students supported the government’s policies, 18% identified with the far right and only 11% with the left.

Last month, two Stellenbosch staff members, Sampie Terreblanche and James Fourie, resigned from the National Party, complaining at the slow pace of reform. Terreblanche, a political economist and vice chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corp., said he had tried to make the government aware of its racial dilemma “but without the necessary success.” Fourie, a law professor, said he could not remain in the party under its present leadership.

No Major Shifts Predicted

Giliomee says that many liberals support the National Party “because at heart they are Afrikaner nationalists--they favor Afrikaner control of the state--and not because the National Party represents certain reformist principles they consider important.”

Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, who quit a year ago as leader of the Progressive Federal Party, similarly predicts that the results of the May 6 election will bring no major shifts in Parliament, where the Nationalists now hold 126 of 178 seats.

The defections of Malan, Worrall and the others “threaten the Nationalist hegemony more symbolically than electorally,” he said.