DR WORRALL PICKS A QUARREL
Peter Fabricius on the
injection of a new element into the South African elections
Cape Town 'FOREIGN critics overjoyed at Worrall campaign,' screamed the headlines the other day in Die Burger, Cape Town's Afrikaner daily and official mouthpiece of the Cape branch of the ruling National Party.
Success for Dr Denis Worrall, the for- mer South African ambassador to London, and his fellow reformist Independents, in the 6 May general elections, Die Burger argued, would increase the sanctions press- ure by sending a message to the world that sanctions worked. This sort of mudpie very typical of Die Burger — would have been fatal to an opposition candidate in any previous South African election.
In every election since the National Party came to power in 1948, the war-cry 'foreign interference' has stampeded voters into the National Party's laager. And any politician seen to be flirting with the schem- ing foreigners was killed in the rush. But this time the mud didn't stick. The arrival of Dr Worrall and his fellow Independents — Dr Esther Lategan of Stellenbosch and Mr Wynand Malan of Randburg — has changed all the old rules of South African politics.
The trio of former government suppor- ters, who are now calling for the scrapping of the government's race policies, have completely altered what threatened to be a humdrum routine exercise. The 1987 elec- tion campaign started off familiarly enough. Announcing it on New Year's Day, President Botha placed foreign press- ure high up on his short list of chief election issues. This was to be expected, after a year when the sanctions screws were turned tighter than ever before.
As the year progressed it became ob- vious that the government intended to fight a right-wing campaign, battening down on reform programmes to prevent further loss of support among Conservatives who fear the country is heading for black majority rule. And, as usual, it would keep the liberal official opposition Progressive Federal Party at bay, casting slurs on its patriotism and its supposed sympathy for the banned liberation movement, the Afri- can National Congress. Trying to impress no one but the racist Right, President Botha climbed aggressively into the ring, freezing plans to reform the Group Areas Act, publicly humiliating his coloured fellow cabinet minister, the Revd Allan Hen- drickse, for swimming on a whites-only beach, and using the privilege of parlia- ment to suggest that the managing director of Barclays bank, Chris Ball, had funded a pro-ANC advertising campaign.
Then Dr Worrall resigned his job at ambassador to London and announced that he would fight the general election in Helderberg, the seat of Mr Chris Heunis, a Cabinet Minister and the leader of the National Party in the Cape. A victory for him, Dr Worrall said, would send a clear message to the world that South Africa was changing for the better.
That sort of tactic is one the Progressive Federal Party would probably have shun- ned, for fear of being labelled unpatriotic in the xenophobic atmosphere created by government-controlled media. But after his long battle against the sanctions lobby, conducted so ably and so visibly, Dr Worrall's loyalty was beyond question. So 'I don't fancy yours.' when he turned on the government to tell it what the world had been telling it for years (that good foreign relations depended on scrapping apartheid), the country listened. He turned the old foreign interference issue on its head and robbed the govern- ment of one of its best election weapons. And by tackling Mr Heunis, the architect of the government's half-hearted reform programme and a pretender to the pres- idency, he dramatically upstaged the gov- ernment and wrested from it the election initiative. He has revived the debate dbout real reform.
As Dr Lategan said the other day, the election campaign started off focusing on the old story of the foreign threat, now it is focused on the central issues. That focus is driving a wedge between the government hierarchy and its enlightened reformist wing, a wedge which goes deeper every day towards the heart of the party. Every day more prominent members are abandoning the party to join the Independent move- ment.
Academics, journalists, businessmen the brain drain from the party is growing from a trickle to a stream. Sportsmen too, feeling the brunt of the country's interna- tional polecat image, have joined the Worrall bandwagon. At Stellenbosch University, the Alma Mater of the government, the Independent initiative has finally precipitated a revolt of National Party academics which has been simmering for years. At last Professor Sampie Terreblanche and his fellow dissi- dents have brought out a manifesto calling for the repeal of the apartheid laws which underpin government policy. The Inde- pendent movement has also provided Pro- fessor Terreblanche and others with a new political home, precipitating their depar- ture from the National Party.
This in turn has caused other defections. A senior news editor of the government- controlled television network SABC res- igned last week because it did not cover the launch of Dr Worrall's campaign. And this weekend the editor of the Afrikaans Sun- day paper Rapport resigned because of government pressure on him not to pay so much attention to the Independents. He is Dr Willem de Klerk, brother of the Cabinet minister F. W. de Klerk, the leader of the National Party in the Transvaal. This sparked a high-profile fraternal confronta- tion and further embarrassed the govern- ment.
In a country which has been wracked by sporadic rioting and killing for 30 months, is still burdened by a state of emergency that seems likely to become a permanent feature, and faces growing sanctions and resulting economic decay, the Worrall bandwagon has understandably created a mood of mild euphoria, even among blacks, who cannot participate in the elec- tion and have borne the brunt of the violence. This is ironic since Dr Worrall and the Independents stand to the right of Progressive Federal Party, which most black activists reject as irrelevant.
In London this week, even Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and campaigner against apartheid, welcomed the latest left-wing defections. They had changed the whole nature of the game he said. But have they really? The Optimists hope that by the elections the Worrall camp will have helped to precipi- tate a split right down the middle of the National Party, and that the Left half of the party will then combine with the Independents and the opposition PFP to form a new reformist government, no less. This week's rather wild speculation in the London Times that the Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr Pik Botha and the Develop- ment Aid Minister, Dr Gerrit Viljoen, intend to form a centrist government after the election is part of that fantasy. It is a very long shot. Come 6 May, will all the euphoria evaporate? Perhaps. The National Party is an awesome election machine and there is no hard evidence that the revolt has really spread at grassrootS level. But there is at least a new force in South African politics and no one can be quite sure what it may not do.
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