Political foes become friends

By M.S. Prabhakara

CAPE TOWN, NOV. 29. The New National Party, in political wilderness since May 1996 when its former leader, Mr. F. W. de Klerk, took what was then the National Party out of the Government of National Unity headed by Mr. Nelson Mandela, is poised to return to office and power in the form of a``co- operative government'' at all three levels of government - national, provincial and local - following a deal with the African National Congress.

The immediate political impact of the deal will be in Western Cape where the existing Democratic Alliance Government will be replaced by a government comprising the NNP and the ANC. It will also mean yet another political comeback for Mr. Peter Marais, the delightfully irreverent NNP leader. With this, the ANC, which was shut out of office after the June 1999 elections despite emerging as the largest single party in the provincial legislature, will also be back in political office. Ironically, the NNP played a leading role in shutting out the ANC by making a deal with the (then) Democratic Party, whose election posters screamed the slogan, ``Keep the ANC out of Western Cape''.

According to the NNP leader, Mr. Marthinus van Schalkwyk, his party now feels more comfortable with the ANC, especially since the ANC has shed its ``socialist rhetoric'' and is committed to ``responsible fiscal policies'. This reading has naturally outraged the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the partners of the ANC- led alliance, whose relationship with the ANC has come under some strain following the two-day general strike called by Cosatu in August this year. However, ANC leaders have not responded to this reading.

The deal also envisages ``executive positions'' for the NNP in the national Government and the seven provinces where the ANC won the majority of seats in 1999 and is the sole ruling party. The situation in KwaZulu-Natal where the Inkatha Freedom Party leads the provincial Government with the ANC as a junior partner is unlikely to be affected by this deal. Speaking to the media, both Mr. Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Mr. Steve Tshwete, ANC leader and Minister for Safety and Security, insisted that the agreement did not mean that the ANC and the NNP had entered into a political alliance.

Indeed, Mr. Van Schalkwyk made a distinction between the constitutionally mandated arrangement that existed in the first two years of democratic government when the ANC, the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party were in a ``government of national unity'', and the forthcoming arrangement of ``co- operative governance''.

The deal marks a political setback for the Democratic Alliance. The party, which is formally still identified in Parliament as the Democratic Party and is the official Opposition, has been nursing fantasies of providing an ``alternative'' to the ANC, mobilising the ``minorities'' against what it termed as ``majoritarian tyranny''. The deal that it struck with the NNP in 1999 in Western Cape was part of this perspective.

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Section  : International
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