All the tension burst in January 1995, during a Cabinet meeting chaired by Mbeki. Mandela had discovered that just before the election 3,500 policemen had been granted indemnity from prosecution for crimes carried out during the apartheid years, and launched into a tirade about de Klerk’s underhand amnesty and his disloyalty to the coalition government. He praised other Afrikaner Ministers, including Roelof Meyer and Pik Botha, concentrating his abuse on de Klerk. “It was a bristling attack,” said one observer, “but with paragraphs and sentences perfectly constructed.” De Klerk started putting away his papers, and said he must reconsider his position. But his colleagues urged him to stay in government, and the next morning he found Mandela “was his old charming self again.” In the afternoon they gave a joint press conference, at which they agreed to clarify the police indemnities.22
De Klerk was reluctant to break up the coalition. “We won’t upset the apple cart,” he told me five months later, “though a few apples will fall.”23 Mandela would still lash into de Klerk when he demanded indemnity for Afrikaners’ past crimes. When in November 1995 de Klerk defended Magnus Malan, his former Minister of Defence, who was being charged with murder, Mandela said de Klerk was becoming a joke: “I am the President of this country. I will decide who gets indemnity, not him.”24 De Klerk in turn was fed up with Mandela: he thought he flew off the handle without checking his facts, and papered over problems with charm and promises. “Ours had never been a marriage of love,” he wrote later. “Now the honeymoon was over.”25
Mandela’s other old problem, Buthelezi, had been appointed Minister for Home Affairs, but his loyalty was still uncertain, and he criticized Mandela for reneging on his preelection promise to allow international mediators to settle the autonomy of KwaZulu-Natal: “He dishonored a solemn commitment,” he said afterward. “It’s as if you say to your wife ‘till death us do part’ and she disappoints you.”26 Buthelezi became dangerously disruptive: he boycotted the first constitutional talks, and then called on Zulus to resist central government: “Our march to freedom has begun.” Mandela overreacted, threatening to cut off funds to KwaZulu and to impose a state of emergency; de Klerk thought he wanted to crush Inkatha by force.27 Mandela and Buthelezi staged another reconciliation, but their personal clashes continued. It was left to Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma to eventually make peace with Inkatha in their low-profile style.
Mandela was much more concerned with the broader problems of transforming the nation from a white oligarchy into a multiracial democracy. Parliament provided a visible pageant of the “Rainbow Nation,” with four hundred M.P.s of all colors thronging the chamber, and the revolutionaries turned into legislators. “I love this dream,” exclaimed Archbishop Tutu. “You sit in the balcony and look down and count all the terrorists. They are all sitting there passing laws. It is incredible.”28 The 252 ANC members, many in colorful robes or bright dresses, far outnumbered the National Party members in their sober suits. The annual opening of Parliament in February 1995 was transformed. The troops still paraded outside the building, the President arrived with an armed guard, and the guns saluted; but now a black choir sang in the entrance, and the “Soweto Strings” played in the street. Inside, the generals were downgraded, while the judges came to the fore. Mandela walked through the chamber, shaking white hands as well as black, and delivered his speech formally from the written text, occasionally adding an impromptu aside. When he stopped to drink some water the members waited in total silence until he raised his glass and said, “Cheers!”
Mandela wanted to use Parliament to consolidate a nonracial democracy, and was concerned that “the Government of National Unity doesn’t go down to the grass roots.”29 He was supported in this by the new Speaker, Frene Ginwala, a formidable Parsee lawyer who had served the ANC for thirty years in Tanzania, Lusaka and London, and who now wanted to educate the ANC to use a Parliament which they had long seen as their enemy.30 She saw the parliamentary democracy as a fragile plant, surrounded by authoritarian traditions, and tried to go back to first principles, learning from European and American models. Mandela had his own friendly battles with Ginwala: she resisted yielding to the executive, and was committed to the separation of powers. When he kissed her on both cheeks she told him: “I’m not sure you are allowed to kiss the Speaker.”31
Parliament’s most important task was to approve a new constitution—which was to be confirmed and fortified by a constitutional court chaired by Arthur Chaskalson, the lawyer who had helped defend Mandela in the Rivonia trial thirty years before. It was a poignant reversal of roles: when Mandela formally opened the court in February 1995, he reminded the lawyers that the last time he had been in court he was finding out whether he would be sentenced to death. And it was the death penalty which soon provided the first argument within the constitutional court. Mandela had wanted Parliament to decide on the question of capital punishment: he thought it was a moral issue, and personally believed that no civilized country should permit it. But the Cabinet decided to send the question to the court, which gave its own ruling, that the death penalty was unconstitutional. The court was soon to assert its independence of the President: when Mandela issued two proclamations affecting elections in the Western Cape, the Premier, Hernus Kriel, appealed to the court, which found that the President had overreached his powers: within an hour Mandela accepted the judgment—as he would often recall.32
The new constitution, to replace the interim agreement, was slowly hammered out by Ramaphosa and his team, reaching compromises to reassure all the parties, and working out safeguards for the Afrikaners’ language and culture. After some brinkmanship it came before Parliament in October 1996, with copies distributed literally hot from the press. Politicians from all parties, from the PAC to the Freedom Front, complained about its shortcomings, but subsequently endorsed it. De Klerk said it showed that governments cannot simply do what they want. Ramaphosa, saying farewell to Parliament, congratulated the parties on rising above their principles.33 But the ratification of the constitution would not put an end to arguments, particularly about the death penalty, which right-wingers, both black and white, were soon clamoring to bring back.
While Parliament projected the rainbow, the real battles to transform the country were waged inside the government departments. The ANC soon realized the full limitations of the sunset clauses. They provided a caricature of the problem of any radical new government trying to push reforms through conservative officials: ANC Ministers had watched videos of the British satirical series Yes, Minister, in which wily civil servants obstructed the reforms of their political masters; but the substructure of officialdom in South Africa was much harder to budge than Whitehall. Some black Ministers suspected their Afrikaner officials of refighting old apartheid battles on new fronts, sniping or ambushing through filing cabinets and shredding machines. Mandela was aware of pockets of Afrikaner right-wing resistance—in the police, the army and intelligence—holding out against any reforms; but he believed most civil servants were cooperative.34
There were disturbing clashes between the more headstrong reforming Ministers and their Directors-General, often about administrative practice rather than ideology: the head of the Housing Ministry, Billy Cobbett, resigned after complaining about irregular contracts arranged by his Minister, Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyeli, who had succeeded Joe Slovo. The political obstacles were sometimes exaggerated by Ministers who were not sure what they wanted to achieve or how. “The civil servants have their own routine and rhythm,” said one senior black civil servant, “but they are basically obedient, waiting to be told what to do.”35 The shrewdest ANC Ministers, like Joe Slovo, could impose their policies quite swiftly: Kader Asmal effectively drove through plans to bring fresh water to rural areas. The basic ANC strategy was to root out and neutralize the senior civil servants who were actively obstructive, but it took time to remove them, and still longer to train qualified black administrators to take their place. The lack of experienced black middle managers, p
articularly in the provincial governments, was the greatest obstacle to the transformation of government, and it was here that the full cost of apartheid policies, and particularly of Bantu education, showed itself.
The ANC faced compromises in every Ministry, as revolutionary dreams gave way to harsh budgets, but the central battleground was the Ministry of Finance. Huge outflows of capital during the previous eighteen months had left reserves dangerously low, and the government had to reassure international investors quickly. Mandela had no experience in economics, but he accepted the imperatives of the global marketplace; de Klerk was impressed that the ANC “accepted a broad framework of responsible economic policies.”36 Mandela reappointed de Klerk’s Finance Minister, Derek Keys, a quiet businessman who became one of the best-liked men in the Cabinet until he resigned a few months later, pleading family reasons. Mandela had to persuade an orthodox banker, Chris Liebenberg, to take his place, while preparing Trevor Manuel, the ANC’s Minister for Trade, as his successor. Manuel, with a militant past as a UDF activist, at first scared the bankers by talking disrespectfully about the global marketplace; but he soon appeared a pillar of financial rectitude.
At the Central Bank Mandela had reappointed the very conservative Chris Stals—a former member of the Broederbond—who was committed to curb inflation through high interest rates. Stals and Manuel became bogeys of the left, but the ANC Ministers learned to live with the strict constraints they imposed: the interest payments on the debts incurred by previous apartheid regimes consumed a fifth of the entire national budget. For a time Mandela had hoped for some kind of Marshall Plan, like the aid Europe had received from America after the Second World War. “What we expect,” he told Time magazine in June 1993, “is that the Western world, led by the U.S., should ensure that massive measures of assistance are given to the people of South Africa.”37 But the ANC soon realized that they must provide their own finance. “The ANC has been in every country in Africa,” said Frank Chikane, the churchman who later ran the Deputy President’s department. “We saw what didn’t work. When international help didn’t come we realized that we must do it ourselves.”38
The retreat was agonizing. The Reconstruction and Development Programme, in which Mandela had placed so much hope, soon proved overambitious. The target of a million new houses in five years could not be reached, and the promises of more jobs proved hollow, as new technologies required fewer employees, and put a premium on skills which most blacks still lacked. Nationalization was no longer seen as an option for creating jobs. It was a bitter pill for ANC Ministers brought up to believe in the benefits of public ownership—not just by the communists, but by Afrikaner governments which had provided thousands of jobs for Afrikaners in overmanned nationalized industries, developing their own version of affirmative action. Now the world told the ANC to privatize industries, to shed jobs, to reject affirmative action and to rapidly reduce the deficit through which apartheid governments had financed their extravagance and oppression.
Mandela faced some disillusion. He had seen how foreign businessmen had piled into the apartheid boom in the sixties while he was in jail, when labor was cheap and the price of gold was shooting up. Now gold was slumping and labor was more expensive, and Africa was shunned by investors, who were racing into the miracle economies of Southeast Asia. He tried to attract investors by reducing exchange controls, preparing to privatize and confronting the unions: but in the end they put their money elsewhere anyway. Mandela had felt the full power of the nation-state, which had jailed him for half his adult life: now he was told that states were losing their power to improve people’s lives or rectify past wrongs.
It was the Ministry of Defence which was Mandela’s special concern, as the sharp end of political power. As Minister he chose Joe Modise, the former MK commander, with Ronnie Kasrils—whom Africans called “the white man with a black heart”—as his deputy. Mandela caused surprise by appointing de Klerk’s head of the defense forces, General Meiring—who had fiercely attacked the ANC in the past—to continue in his post for five years; but Meiring had appeared helpful to Mandela before the election, and now promised loyalty to him (he boasted to fellow defense officers that the President had talked to him on the phone for forty minutes).39 And Modise and Kasrils gave more powers to the new civilian Secretary of Defence, Pierre Steyn, the ex–Air Force General who had effectively uncovered third-force activities.
Defense remained the trickiest territory, a potential base for a coup or revolt. Many Afrikaner generals still controlled powerful military networks which could withhold crucial facts about secret operations, arms sales or lists of informers, while the ANC’s own former guerrillas were hard to integrate with the Afrikaner army, and reluctant to accept stricter discipline. Mandela had to intervene personally when in October 1994 three thousand MK soldiers refused to return from leave, warning them that they would be charged if they did not return within a week. The British government sent a small military team to advise on integrating the white and black forces, which later warned about Afrikaner obstructiveness; some ANC politicians wished that they had involved the British more closely, as the Namibian government had. Mandela kept a close eye on intelligence reports, which were themselves subject to rival loyalties. He still seemed confident—perhaps too confident—of General Meiring’s loyalty.
Mandela’s government was being closely watched by the world’s businessmen and diplomats, above all for signs of corruption. They dreaded that South Africa would descend into the economic morass that had swamped so many potentially prosperous African countries like Nigeria and Kenya. Mandela had inherited a much more venal system than those farther north, who had taken over from reasonably honest colonial administrators. The Afrikaner governments had been notorious for receiving bribes ever since Kruger’s republic in the nineteenth century, and Mandela rightly said that the apartheid administrations were “stiff in corruption.” The ANC needed to clean up both the networks of bribes and favors in Pretoria and the poisoned Bantustan governments built up by black dictators; while white entrepreneurs were now dangling bribes in front of politicians to acquire business footholds, particularly for casinos. In August 1997 South Africa was reckoned by one international survey of corruption to be thirty-third out of fifty-two countries surveyed, with Denmark the least corrupt and Nigeria the most.40
Mandela himself was visibly self-denying: he lived simply, and gave a third of his presidential salary to the Children’s Fund, which was his special charity. During the elections he had promised an end to the political gravy train: “We are not going to live as fat cats.” But M.P.s were soon under fire for accepting big salary hikes. The critics included Archbishop Tutu, who made the fierce quip “The government stopped the gravy train long enough to get on it.” Mandela snapped back publicly against Tutu’s “act of irresponsibility,” and told him he should have raised the matter in private. Tutu replied that he had, and that Mandela had impugned his integrity. The two men soon settled their quarrel. Mandela rang Tutu, complaining, “Why shout at me in public?” but was soon laughing. A few months later Mandela announced a cut in the salaries of M.P.s and the President. Tutu continued to deeply admire Mandela’s leadership. “If this man wasn’t there, the whole country would have gone up in flames.”41
Much more serious were charges of embezzlement and misappropriation. The ANC were especially damaged by charges against Allan Boesak, their former leader in the Western Cape who had been the heroic cofounder of the UDF. After Boesak’s marital scandal Mandela stood by him during the elections, against the advice of several colleagues, and afterward appointed him Ambassador to the UN in Geneva. Then a Danish aid agency complained that funds sent via Boesak had gone astray, and asked a Johannesburg law firm to investigate. They found that Boesak had “enriched himself substantially” to buy a house and pay for his second wedding. A government report found the accusations unproven, and Mandela insisted that Boesak was innocent. The law nevertheless took its course, and Boesak, while in
America, was charged with embezzlement. When he returned, the Minister of Justice, Dullah Omar—who was also Chairman of the ANC in the Western Cape—welcomed him at the airport with a supportive speech. The opposition complained that Mandela was putting party loyalty above public probity; but the trial went ahead, and in March 1999 Boesak was found guilty on four counts of fraud or theft, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.42
By the end of Mandela’s first year as President, the honeymoon had ended. White South Africans were complaining bitterly about the crime wave, the falling rand, corruption scandals, upheavals in hospitals and schools. Liberals were disillusioned that a black government was ignoring their advice; other whites never thought it would work anyway. White South Africa had been a uniquely privileged society under previous regimes, protected both from black competition and from the world marketplace, and found it hard to adjust to an open democracy. “There is a bizarre pessimism in the leafy suburbs of what was previously exclusively white South Africa,” said Kader Asmal in February 1997, “a pessimism which totally fails to take account of the remarkably favourable arrangements made for whites.”43
Most blacks took a much less pessimistic view, with longer perspectives. The rural poor saw the extension of primary health care and the arrival of water taps; and in the cities the burgeoning black middle class saw expanding opportunities in industry and commerce. But their prospects looked less hopeful when unemployment increased and new jobs failed to materialize; and overseas investors were discouraged. As the Financial Times wrote in May 1996: “Rising crime and slow employment growth, failure to deliver on promises to cut the country’s huge housing backlog and illegal immigration from impoverished neighbours have all contributed to declining business confidence.”44 By November 1996 the ANC had to admit serious mistakes, in a “half-term performance review”: “The ANC has gone into government for the first time and we have a steep learning curve in matters of governance.… When we went into government we expected problems but not of the magnitude that we have.”
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