South African History Online

Report by the President of the ANC, Nelson Mandela to the 50th National Conference of the African National Congress

Mafikeng, 16 December 1997

Introduction

The first three years have provided us with a multi-faceted domestic and
international experience which also lays the basis of the agenda for the period
ahead of us, both for the ANC and the rest of the progressive movement of our
country.

The purpose of this Political Report is to reflect on these matters.
Hopefully, it will also assist Conference as it formulates both our policy
positions and the programme of action that will guide our activities in the
period up to our next Conference at the end of the 20th Century.

What are these matters?

The Principal Issues

The first of these is that - the principal result of our revolution, the
displacement of the apartheid political order by a democratic system, has become
an established fact of South African society.

Secondly - the majority of our people have chosen the national liberation
movement, led by the ANC, as the political force that should lead our country as
it goes through its post-apartheid process of reconstruction and
development.

Thirdly - the challenges of creating a people-centred society, of living up
to the vision contained in the Freedom Charter, requires that all elements of
South African society be subjected to genuine reconstruction and
development.

Fourth - that process of reconstruction and development will also have to
encompass the spiritual life of the nation, bearing on the moral renewal of
individuals and institutions, as well as the ideas and practice of a new
patriotism.

Fifth - the success of our process of reconstruction and development will, to
a good extent, depend on the peoples of our region of Southern Africa and Africa
as a whole themselves achieving the same goals that we pursue, of democracy,
peace, prosperity and social progress, within the context of an African
Renaissance.

Sixth - we have to succeed in our objectives in the context of an accelerated
process of globalisation which is leading to a greater integration of the
nations of the world, the limitation of the sovereignty of states and the
enhancement of the disparities between the rich and the poor.

Seventh - we have to construct our system of international relations in a
manner consistent with our domestic programme of reconstruction and development
and our vision of a world of democracy, peace, prosperity and social progress
for all.

Eighth - the objective of reconstruction and development cannot be achieved
unless the ANC and the rest of the progressive movement of our country are
strong and united around the realisation of clear policy objectives which
actually result in reconstruction and development.

This Political Report will therefore focus on these matters as they have
impacted on South African life in the last three years.

Stabilisation of democracy

Our democratic system is now three-and-half years old. Nothing has happened
since our last Conference which threatened its survival.

In other words, there has been no open and serious counter-revolutionary
offensive which sought to reverse this historic victory of our national
liberation struggle.

Neither have any serious mistakes been made by the democratic movement
itself, which would create the conditions for the rejection of the new order by
the masses of our people.

Further, there has been no breakdown in the system of governance. Whatever
the limitations and occasional mistakes, if any, we have ensured that all organs
of state, including the national, provincial and local legislatures and
executives, as well as the judicial system, continue to function.

Similarly, we have succeeded to maintain the unity and territorial integrity
of the country, having guarded against any serious tendency towards
balkanisation, such as would be reflected by an intense conflict around the
question of provincial boundaries.

Since the first democratic elections of 1994, free and fair local government
elections were held in 1995 and 1996, which produced local legislative and
executive organs of government which were accepted as legitimate by the masses
of the people.

Since then, a significant number of local bi-elections have been held, again
in a manner consistent with our goal of ensuring an open and legitimate
democratic process.

Last year, the national legislature, acting as a representative Constituent
Assembly, and after interacting with millions of our citizens, adopted a
Constitution which replace the 1993 Interim Constitution, which had been drafted
and legislated into force by structures which had not been elected by the people
as a whole.

During these last three years, the Constitutional Court and other echelons of
the judiciary have also acted to discharge their responsibility as the guardian
of the constitutional order, annulling decisions of both the legislature and the
executive where these were in conflict with the Constitution.

In all instances, these authorities of state have respected the decisions of
the courts, or relied on the courts for redress, thus contributing to the
entrenchment of our democratic system.

We can also say the same thing about other independent organs of state, such
as the Public Protector, the Auditor General and the Human Rights
Commission.

These important successes do not, however, mean that the obligation to
defend, advance and deepen democracy has disappeared and that anti-democratic
forces of counter-revolution no longer exist in our society.

Indeed, one of the reasons why we have not seen these forces raise their ugly
head more forcefully, has been the fact that our programme of reconstruction and
development is at its early stages.

Consequently, because we have just begun, the process of fundamental social
transformation has not yet impacted seriously on the apartheid paradigm which
affects all aspects of our lives.

This process has therefore not yet tested the strength of the
counter-offensive which would seek to maintain the privileges of the white
minority.

However, the desire to maintain these privileges has been demonstrated
consistently during the period since our last Conference.

This is exemplified, for instance, by the determined effort to define the
process of national reconciliation, which our movement has sought to encourage
in the national interest, in a manner that would result in the protection of the
positions of those who were privileged by the apartheid system.

Accordingly, during the last three years, the opponents of fundamental change
have sought to separate the goal of national reconciliation from the critical
objective of social transformation.

In many instances, they have sought to set these one against the other, with
a view to the elevation of the first of these aims to a position of hegemony,
with national reconciliation defined as being characterised by such measures as
would compensate the white minority for the loss of its monopoly of political
power by guaranteeing its privileged positions in the socio-economic sphere.

In the detail, we have seen this reflected in the assertion that our
programme of affirmative action to address the racial disparities we inherited
from the apartheid system, is permissible and can be pursued, provided that it
is carried out within such bounds as would be acceptable to those who occupy
positions of privilege.

Thus, whenever we have sought real progress through affirmative action, the
spokespersons of the advantaged have not hesitated to try foul, citing all
manner of evil - such as racism, violation of the constitution, nepotism,
dictatorship, inducing a brain drain and frightening the foreign investor.

When he had to dealt with this very same question of racial equality, the
then President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, had this to say:

"We seek not just freedom but opportunity - not just legal equity but human
ability - not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and
as a result."

In truth, the debate on these issues in our own country has not reached the
level of honesty and sophistication achieved in the United States more than
three decades ago, when, at Howard University in June 1965, President Johnson
uttered the words we have just cited, motivated by the adoption in this own
country of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Further, even a cursory study of the positions adopted by the mainly white
parties is the national legislature during the last three years, the National
Party, the Democratic Party and the Freedom Front will show that they and the
media which represents the same social base, have been most vigorous in their
opposition, whenever legislative and executive measures have been introduced,
seeking the end the racial disparities which continue to characterise our
society.

Equally, we have experienced serious resistance to the transformation of the
public service, with representatives of the old order using all means in their
power to ensure that they remain in dominant positions.

Some among these owe no loyalty to the new constitutional and political order
nor to the government of the day, and have no intention to implement our
government's programmes aimed at reconstruction and development.

At the same time, the former ruling establishment has refused to cooperate
with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, especially with regard to telling
the truth about the National Security Management System it had established as a
comprehensive and last ditch mechanism to protect the criminal apartheid system,
including the informers, agents and operatives who were such an important part
of this system.

The reason for this is that the defenders of apartheid privilege continue to
sustain a conviction that an opportunity will emerge in future, when they can
activate this counter-insurgency machinery, to impose an agenda on South African
society which would limit the possibilities of the democratic order to such an
extent that it would not be able to create a society of equality, that would be
rid of the legacy of apartheid.

During the period under review, the counter-revolution has also sought to
regroup to create the possibility for itself to act decisively to compromise the
democratic system at whatever moment it considered opportune.

Accordingly, various elements of the former ruling group have been working to
establish a network which would launch or intensify a campaign of
destablisation, some of whose features would be:

• the weakening of the ANC and its allies;
• the use of crime to render the country ungovernable;
• the subversion of the economy; and
• the erosion of the confidence of both our people and the rest of the world
  in our capacity both to govern and to achieve our goals of reconstruction and
  development.

This counter-revolutionary network, which is already active and bases itself
on those in the public administration and others in other sectors of our society
who have not accepted the reality of majority rule, is capable of carrying out
very disruptive actions. It measures its own success by the extent to which it
manages to weaken the democratic order.

Consistent with the objectives we have just mentioned, it has engaged in
practical activities since our last Conference which include:

• the encouragement and commission of crime;
• the weakening and incapacitation of the state machinery, including the
  theft of public assets, arms and ammunition being among these;
• the hiding of sensitive and important information from legal organs of
  state; and
• the building of alternative structures, including intelligence machineries
  as well as armed formations.

Evidence also exists that elements of this counter-revolutionary conspiracy
have established or are maintaining a variety of international contacts.

Some of these are neo-fascist groupings. Others are old contracts established
during the years of the international isolation of apartheid South Africa.

And yet others belong among establishment forces which, for one reason or
another, are afraid of and are opposed to the fundamental transformation of our
society.

Despite all this, it would be correct to say that the overwhelming majority
of both our own people and the peoples of the world remain committed to the
defence of the democratic system in our country and would be ready to act in
pursuit of this goal whenever the need arose for them to express that commitment
in action.

Our experience of democracy over the last three years also points to the fact
that we still have to address adequately a number of problems that are relevant
to the very character of this democracy.

One of these is the translation into practice of the concept expressed in the
Freedom Charter in the words - "The People shall Govern" - and more recently, in
the concept of a people-driven process of change.

The difficulty around this issue has sometimes been explained as the
contradiction between representative democracy and participatory democracy.

Where the people have freely elected representatives to govern and have the
right and possibility to change such representatives, what need is there for
these elected representatives to seek a popular mandate for every decision they
have to make!

But if they do not seek such mandates, how do we avoid the development of an
elite, alienated from the people, that, during its five years in office, will
implement policies which, in reality, do not represent the will of the
people!

In our circumstances, this is related to the two questions of the possibility
of representatives elected on a party list system to represent distinct
geographic constituencies and the issue of the possibility of such
representatives to abandon their parties and "cross the floor" or form their own
parties.

All these are matters that require further discussion to which this
Conference must attend, informed by the twin realities of our commitment to the
deepening of democracy, predicated on the empowerment of the citizen to impact
on governance, and our sensitivity to the realities of our situation, which
calls for dynamic stability interacting with the imperative for change.

At another level, we have to consider these matters in the context of the
impact of the continuing technological revolution on communication and
information, which results in the enhancement of the ability of the citizens and
non-governmental organisations to intervene in the process of governance on an
informed basis, independent of information provided and opinions propagated by
political parties and state institutions.

As a movement, we would not consider this development as a threat to either
the professional politician or the public service manager. Rather, it enhances
the possibility for the realisation of the demand that "the people shall
govern".

Nevertheless, the force of inertia would suggest that the most likely
response of both the politician and the public servant would be to defend their
positions as the mediators, the prism through which the interpretation of
reality and the posing of policy options to the citizen, must necessarily
traverse.

Put crudely, precisely at the point when the process of social development
confers "sovereign" powers of decision-making to the citizen, and because of
this, the politician and the public servant will or may be driven to argue that
"the man in the street" is incapable of governing himself without the
intervention of the professionals.

Obviously, the matter we are raising is relevant not only to ourselves, but
is a vexed question which impacts on the functioning of all democracies
throughout the world.

Returning to our own reality we must make the point that our experience of
the last three years points to the importance of non-governmental organisations
(NGO's), community-based organisations (CBOs) and grassroots-based political
formations in ensuring popular participation in governance.

The effective and admirable way in which many of these structures have
functioned has served to emphasise the point that, in many instances, the public
service, however efficient it may be, may not be the best instrument to mobilise
for popular involvement and participation.

However, we must also draw attention to the fact that many of our
non-governmental organisations are not in fact NGO's, both because they have no
popular base and the actuality that they rely on the domestic and foreign
governments, rather than the people, for their material sustenance.

As we continue the struggle to ensure a people-driven process of social
transformation, we will have to consider the reliability of such NGO's as a
vehicle to achieve this objective.

The success achieved by many CBO's based on the contribution of "sweat
equity" by very poor communities, points to the need for us seriously to
consider the matter of the nature of the so-called organs of civil society.

Another matter relevant to the aim of entrenching and deepening democracy is
the unresolved question of the role of the traditional leaders, especially in
the context of the establishment of a democratic system of local government and
the impact of traditional African societies on the formation of the new South
Africa.

The departure of the National Party from the Government of National Unity in
1996 also brought to the fore the contradiction that derives from the need for
the various political formations in our country to act together to promote a
national consensus in the context of, and as opposed, to the felt imperative of
especially the minority parties to act on their own account, in order to
maintain their individual identity in the eyes of the electorate.

Institutionally, this found expression in the concept of a "government of
national unity" reflected in the composition of the executives and the
leadership of the legislative structures at all three levels of government.

The reality of the last three years is that the white parties have
essentially decided against the pursuit of a national agenda. Rather, they have
chosen to propagate a reactionary, dangerous and opportunist position which
argues that:

• a normal and stable democracy has been achieved;
• the apartheid system is a thing of the past;
• their legitimate responsibility is to oppose us as the majority party,
  this to present themselves as elements of a shadow government which has no
  responsibility both for our past and our presents; and consequently, that
• they have a democratic obligation merely to discredit the ruling party, so
  that they may gain power after the next elections.

The delegates will readily recognise the fallacy of these arguments. They
will draw on their own practical experiences, which will have demonstrated to
all of us how much this approach, driven by partisan interests, undermines the
effort to consolidate a stable non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous democracy
in our country.

As we have said, the issue of how to address commonly defined national
objectives in a united manner, while protecting the identities and public appeal
of the separate political parties and formations, remains a matter which only
the future will be able to resolve.

We have failed to achieve this result during the last three years.

The answer to this and other undecided questions must form part of the
policies we elaborate at this Conference, to ensure that the important victory
of the liberation movement to establish a democratic order, serves as a basis
for the defence and advancement of our revolutionary gains.

We would also like to report that during the last three years, we allocated a
particular responsibility to the Presidency, and therefore the necessary
capacity, to ensure that the entirety of our Government focuses of the questions
of the emancipation of women, youth development, the rights of the child and the
empowerment and development of the disabled.

We took this decision because we are convinced that forward movement in these
areas is central to the very nature of our democracy and is not a mere matter of
partisan political programmes.

It has been a fundamental feature of our policy for many years that ours
could not be a genuine democracy unless the complete emancipation of women was
an inherent part of any process of democratisation.

It is critical that this commitment should find expression in actual
programmes that address the gender question in a way which enables us to measure
progress actually achieved.

We are therefore pleased that, in the last three years, we have succeeded to
establish the Commission for Gender Equality and the Office on the Status of
Women in the Presidency, as well as adopt as Government, the Beijing Platform of
Action dedicated to the goal of the emancipation of women.

Similarly responding to the other matters we have mentioned as being
fundamental to the very nature of our democracy, we have:

• established the National Youth Commission within the Presidency, which has
  now elaborated a national Programme for Youth Development;
• established an Office on the Status of the Disabled, again within the
  Presidency, and adopted the first ever White Paper spelling out an integrated
  policy for the upliftment of the disabled; and,
• *ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and
  constituted a permanent Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Rights of the
  Child, headed by the Presidency.

These matters will continue to receive the focused attention of the
Government as part of the defining feature of the people-centred democracy we
are committed to create.

We will return to some of the issues raised in this Section under other
Sections of this Political Report.

ANC in Government

We now turn to the second major subject of this Report, viz the fact that the
people have chosen our movement as the government of South Africa.

As the Conference is aware, the confidence our people have in the ANC,
demonstrated throughout our years of struggle and the 1994 elections, was
confirmed in the local government elections held in 1995 and 1996.

It would also be true to say that our own direct contact wit the masses of
the people throughout the country, during the last three years, has continued to
indicate that this popular confidence has not been dented.

It is however also true that we are still faced wit the challenge of
increasing our support among all three national minorities.

It is clear that the majority within these national minorities continue to
believe that the ANC represents the interests of the African majority and that
their own perceived interests stand opposed to those of the African
majority.

This is a direct hangover from the apartheid years during which the policies
of the racist ruling group discriminated against this majority, in favour of the
national minorities, especially the whites.

It is as a result of this racist practice that the view has emerged that
where apartheid benefited the national minorities, a non-racial democracy would
disadvantage them

Such imagined disadvantage would range from economic and employment
opportunities to language and cultural rights.

The Conference is aware that the National Party, in particular, has continued
to exploit this apartheid legacy to present itself as the political
representative of the national minorities.

In this regard and characteristically, it raises the spectre of a "swart
gevaar" to frighten these sections of our population to its ranks unashamedly
using the apartheid years of racist policies as justification for the argument
that the national minorities should entrust their future to the party of
apartheid.

As we can expect, among the Coloureds an Indians, the view that the
non-racial democracy constitutes as threat would be most prevalent among the
working class and the lower middle class, who would be the first to feel the
pressure of African competition in the context of a deracialised labour
market.

It is among these sectors of the population that we find the greatest fear of
the impact of our policy of affirmative action.

This has required especially of the principal political forces that we agree
on a common, multi-party agenda of transformation that these forces would
advance and defend, in the interests of the medium and long term future of our
democratic, united, non-racial and non-sexist country.

Accordingly, each on of these forces would, as part of this agreement,
promote this agenda even when its particular constituency felt that such an
agenda did not serve its immediate interests.

Clearly, the promotion of the concept of united national action, designed to
bring together all political parties so that we can ensure the greatest unity
around the fundamental issues facing our society, must therefore, also take into
account the desire of thee parties not to seen as lackeys of the ANC.

During these past three years, it has been a basic tenet of our approach that
despite our people's achievement in stabilising the democratic settlement, we
are still involved in a delicate process of nursing the new-born baby into a
state of adulthood.

It is therefore clear that we continue to be faced with the major challenge
to sustain our political work among the national minorities focusing on the two
issues of:

• educating them both about our policies and the country's constitutional
  framework, which requires of government that it pursues non-discriminatory
  policies and provides for the protection and promotion of language, cultural
  and religious rights; and;
• urging them to be active participants in, and not passive objects of the
  process of determining the future of our country, including the "resolution"
  of the national question.

It has also become clear during the past three years that elements among the
former ruling group, especially among the Afrikaners, suffers from a sense of
disempowerment and marginalisation from the centres of political power.

Put in other words, these elements find it difficult to redefine their role
in the setting of a non-racial democracy. They continue to be imprisoned by
notions of white supremacy and of supposed Afrikaner interests that are separate
and opposed to the interest of the rest of the population.

To advance their interests, they use every opportunity to present their
"disempowerment and marginalisation" as being the disempowerment and
marginalisation of the Afrikaner population as a whole.

Thus they seek to mobilise especially the Afrikaner population against the
non-racial democracy, to force the democratic order to introduce a system of
government net based on majority, rule, but on an entrenched process of
co-determination with those who would, in one way or another, be selected as the
political representatives of the Afrikaners.

What this points to is the need for us to increase our political work among
the whites in general and the Afrikaner population in particular. This work
should draw in all sectors of our broad movement, including the progressive
trade union movement.

It is generally true that in the last three years, inadvertently and
unconsciously, we have tended to surrender these sections of our people to the
white political parties, on the basis that it was unlikely that we could
persuade them to join our electoral support base.

Once again, we must emphasise the point that one of the national
responsibilities of our movement is to mobilise all sectors of our population
actively to participate in the process of determining the future of our country,
without necessarily expecting that they should become active supporters of the
ANC.

Efforts have also been made during the last three years to use the
traditional leaders against our movement, especially in KwaZulu-Natal and the
Eastern Cape.

All this emphasises the need for us to agree on a clear and consistent policy
with regard to the institution of traditional leadership and to popularise this
policy among the population in general.

Our work in this regard will be greatly assisted by the positions agreed at
our Policy Conference held at the beginning of last month.

We must also make the point that our work in this area has not been assisted
by the positions and activities of some sections within the broad democratic
movement which, in reality, have sought the destruction of the institution of
traditional leadership, on the basis that this institution was incompatible with
a democratic political system.

These ahistorical positions, detached from reality and contemptuous of the
views of our rural masses, have nothing to do with the defence and advancement
of the democratic revolution. They constitute an infantile radicalism of which
the broad democratic movement must rid itself.

They help to create the possibility for the forces of reaction in the
countryside to undermine the confidence of the rural masses in our movement.

In its turn, this enhances the ability of reaction to encourage the
consolidation of conditions conducive to the expansion of its own influence, for
purposes opposed to such genuine transformation of our country as would serve
the interests of these rural masses, among others.

We must bear this in mind that it is precisely these masses who demonstrated
the greatest loyalty to our movement in the national, provincial and local
government elections.

We must also refer to sections on the non-governmental sector which seek to
assert that the distinguishing feature of a genuine organisation of civil
society is to be a critical "watchdog" over our movement, both inside and
outside of government.

Pretending to represent an independent and popular view, supposedly obviously
legitimised by the fact that they are described as non-governmental
organisations, these NGO's also work to corrode the influence of the
movement.

Strangely, some of the argument for this so-called "watchdog" role was
advanced from within the ranks of the broad democratic movement, at the time
when we all arrived at the decision that with the unbanning of the ANC and other
democratic organisations, it was necessary to close down the UDF.

Thus we ended up with the situation in which certain elements, which were
assumed to be part of our movement, set themselves up as critics of the same
movement, precisely at the moment when we would have to confront the challenge
of the fundamental transformation of our country and therefore, necessarily, the
determined opposition of the forces of reaction.

They lack the issue-driven mass base that is the defining feature of any real
NGO and are therefore unable to raise funds from the people themselves.

This has also created the possibility for some of these NGO's to act as
instruments of foreign governments and institutions that fund them to promote
the interests of these external forces.

For example, a "Review of the U.S.Aid Program in South Africa" dated November
5, 1996 and prepared by two members of the staff of the US House of
Representatives, Lester Munson and Phillip Christenson, has this to say on this
matter:

"AID's program is not so much support for the Mandela government as support
for AID's undisclosed political activities within the South African domestic
political arena involving the most difficult, controversial issues in South
Africa. By funding advocacy groups to monitor and lobby for changes in
government policies and even setting up trust funds to pay for legal
challenges in court against the new government's action or inaction, AID is in
some respects making President Mandela's task more difficult."

Later the Review states:

"Two-thirds of AID's funding.... is used to fund AID-dependent NGO's... The
Old "struggle NGO's" have been redesignated by AID as "civil service
organisations" (or "CSOs"). AID now funds CSOs to "monitor public policy,
provide public information, and advocate policy alternatives" and to serve as
"sentinels, brokers and arbiters for the public will. "The purpose of AID
funding is to enable these CSOs to "function as effective policy advocacy
groups" and "to lobby"... Through its NGOs, AID intends to play a key role in
domestic policy concerning the most difficult, controversial issues of
national politics. AID's political agenda is ambitious and extensive."

Earlier in this Report we referred to issue of the effort at the time of the
dissolution of the UDF to set up an NGO "movement" separate from an critical of
the ANC.

At the time, the newspaper "Business Day" cited the spokespersons of this
effort as explaining the "actions (this movement) might take" in the following
terms:

"Firstly, it would ensure that isolated communities would have a channel to
voice their grievances. Secondly, it would allow bodies which might normally
support the party in power but which disagreed with government on a particular
issue a voice unconstrained by political affiliation."

And more directly, these spokespersons are quoted as saying:

"It would be very wrong and a mistake for the ANC to try to co-opt
organisations involved in the UDF. Life must exist, plants must grow outside
the ANC.

It is presumably some of these plants that were and perhaps are still being
funded by some from outside our country to promote their own political agenda
within our country.

The drive to ensure the involvement of civil society and its organisations
in the process of governance is an important pillar of our work to translate
into reality the concept that "the people shall govern."

However, the past three years have taught us the lesson that there are NGO's
and NGO's. As a movement, we have to learn to make this distinction, we have to
learn to make this distinction, recognise the great relevance and importance of
the Community-based Organisations (CBO's) and defeat the pressure blindly to
accept a Liberal determination of which organisation is an NGO and what role
such NGO's should play.

Similarly, we have to confront the fact that during the last three years, the
matter has become perfectly clear that the bulk of the mass media in our country
has set itself up as force opposed to the ANC.

In a manner akin to what the National Party is doing in its sphere, this
media exploits the dominant positions it achieved as a result of the apartheid
system, to campaign against both real change and the real agents of change, as
represented by our movement, led by the ANC.

In this context, it also takes advantage of the fact that, thanks to decades
of repression and prohibition of a mass media genuinely representative of the
voice of the majority of the people of South Africa, this majority has no choice
but to rely for information and communication on a media representing the
privileged minority.

To protect its own privileged positions, which are a continuation of the
apartheid legacy, it does not hesitate to denounce all efforts to ensure its own
transformation, consistent with the objectives of a non-racial democracy, as an
attack on press freedom.

When it speaks against us, this represents freedom of thought, speech and the
press - which the world must applaud!

When we exercise our own right to freedom of thought and speech to criticise
it for its failings, this represents an attempt to suppress the freedom of the
press -for which the world must punish us!

Thus the media uses the democratic order, brought about by the enormous
sacrifices of our own people, as an instrument to protect the legacy of racism,
graphically described by its own patterns of ownership, editorial control, value
system and advertiser influence.

At the same time, and in many respects, it has shown a stubborn refusal to
discharge its responsibility to inform the public.

Consistent with the political posture it has assumed, it has been most
vigorous in disseminating such information as it believes serves to discredit
and weaken our movement. By this means, despite its professions of support for
democracy, it limits the possibility to expand the frontiers of democracy, which
would derive from the empowerment of the citizen to participate meaningfully in
the process of governance through timeous access to reliable information.

I know that these comments will be received with a tirade of denunciation,
with claims that what we are calling for is a media that acts as a "lapdog"
rather than a "watchdog".

We must reiterate the positions of our movement that we ask for no favours
from the media and we expect none. We make no apology for making the demand that
the media has a responsibility to society to inform.

Neither do we doubt the correctness of our assessment of the role the media
has played in the last three years. All of us know too much about what happens
in the newsrooms.

In any case, we have to confront the product of the posture of the media
daily. This daily product, reflected in all the media of communication, stands
out too stark in its substance to allow us to doubt the conclusions of our
analysis.

Conference will have to consider what measures we have to take. In addition
to what we are doing already, to improve our communication with our population
at large.

In part, this must address the objective of enabling the still disadvantaged
millions of our people, who are being deliberately disadvantaged even in the
area of access to information, to know what is really happening in and to their
country and their future.

Again, this would enable these masses, who sacrificed everything for
democracy, including the freedom of the press, to take informed decisions about
what they have to do to influence the process of the reconstruction of their own
country, including the critical objective of its deracialisation.

Later in this Report, we will discuss the intrusion of this self-same media
within our ranks, during the last three years to encourage our own
self-destruction, with the active involvement of some who are present here as
bona fide delegates to the Conference of a movement to which they owe no
loyalty.

At the same time as we consider these matters, we must also reaffirm our
commitment to the freedom of the press and demonstrate this in all our practical
activities.

We must now, come to the role of the opposition parties in their effort to
challenge and undermine our role as the political force chosen by the people to
lead our country, as it goes through its post-apartheid process of
reconstruction and developments.

These parties see themselves as playing an opposition role to the ruling
party in a multi-party democracy.

Our movement, which led the struggle for the defeat of the apartheid regime
and the establishment of the new constitutional and political order, respects
and defends the right of these parties to play this legal opposition role
without let or hindrance.

Equally, we assert our own right to engage these parties in peaceful,
political and legal combat in defence of our policies and programmes, also
without let or hindrance.

Throughout its years as the ruling party, and before, the National Party
consistently pursued the strategic goal of the destruction of our movement and
organisation.

When it had the power so to act, it banned our organisation, murdered,
tortured, imprisoned and exiled our members and supporters, demonised our
movement and allowed itself to limit in the pursuit of the objective of our
total destruction.

Some of the truth about all this is now being told through the processes in
which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is engaged.

This includes the callous exploitation of the religious sensibilities of many
who served in the apartheid security forces, to convince them to view and
therefore deal with us as the anti-Christ.

Our experience over the last three years confirms that the National Party has
not abandoned its strategic objective of the total destruction of our
organisation and movement. The leopard has not changed its spots.

Its only problem is that it lacks the power it once had, to pursue this aim.
Accordingly, it is involved in a desperate search to find the ways and means to
destroy its historic enemy, to enable it to discharge its responsibility of
defending white privilege.

All we need to do to understand the correctness of this thesis, is to study
the positions the National Party has adopted inside and outside parliament,
during the last three years, with regard both to our policy positions and to our
movement itself.

Again, as we have already indicated, with regard to the first of these, this
Party has put up the most determined opposition to all the legislative and White
Paper initiatives we have taken to effect the non-racial transformation of our
country.

This has included reliance on instruments of last resort, such as the
obstruction of the passage of transformative legislation by appealing to the
Constitutional Court. The withdrawal of the National Party from the Government
of National Unity in 1996 constituted its own statement that it could not
coexist, within the same government, with a political formation towards which it
harboured feelings of implacable enmity.

The story it told of its inability to influence government policy was
entirely fictional.

As a result, the more honest among its members, who occupied executive
positions and were driven by the desire to protect the interests of both the
Afrikaners and the rest of the population, did not support the decision to pull
out of the GNU.

Forgetting its earlier assertion that within the GNU it was powerless, the
National Party nevertheless presented a contrary argument towards the end of
this year with regard to one of the Education Bills. In this instance, it argued
that it wanted this Bill to be phrased in a form consistent with what it had
negotiated while it served within the GNU.

But so strong was its antipathy towards our movement that, in pulling out of
the GNU, it was ready to sacrifice its most far-sighted and open-minded members
and leaders, to reinforce the tendency towards the consolidation of the National
Party around the most reactionary positions it could take within our non-racial
democracy.

Its determination to abide by its old strategic position is also reflected in
the manner in which it has treated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

We refer here not only to the refusal of its leaders to take responsibility
for their share in the commission of gross human rights violations. We draw
attention to its absolute refusal to disclose the counter-insurgency machinery
of repression it had put in place in its effort to protect the apartheid system,
the National Security Management System.

We have made presentations to the TRC to indicate that this machinery was
never dismantled, and therefore remains available to this day to those in our
country who were part of the apartheid security forces and are still interested
in engaging in anti-democratic activity.

The question has not been answered as to why the National Party has gone to
the lengths it has to ensure that the truth is not known about the System and
those who were integrated within it. Over the last three years, the National
Party has continued to wage a struggle to hold on to its support among the white
population in the first place, but also among the Coloureds and Indians.

To ensure that it insulates these sections of our population from our
influence, it has continued to rely on its traditional resort to the use of
fear. As before, it has continued to frighten the national minorities against
the ANC by threatening them with both a "swart gevaar" (black danger) and a
"rooi gevaar" (red danger).

The use of the instruments of fear is most prominent in the political
positions taken by its leaders in the Western Cape. Daily, this leadership
propagates the entirely false notion that our policies are aimed at promoting
the interests of the Africans against those of both the whites and the
Coloureds.

Accordingly, they argue, the national government is actually denying the
provincial government its legitimate share of national revenues, deliberately to
worsen the standard of living of both the Coloureds and the whites.

With its recent decision to exclude the ANC from the Western Cape provincial
government, the National Party has taken its deeply held positions to their
logical conclusion. Naturally, as a representative of the same white interests
which the National Party represents, the Democratic Party has elected to join
forces with the NP in the Western Cape.

This occurs precisely at the moment when it is striving at the national
level, in the after-math of its municipal by-election victories against the NP,
dishonestly to present itself as an opponent of the very same National Party
with which it is entering into coalition in the Western Cape.

As the country knows, the Democratic Party has sought to present itself as
the most effective parliamentary opposition to the ANC.

Knowing that it has no possibility to attract the masses of the disadvantaged
of our country, the Democratic Party, which has no policy differences with the
NP, has sought to position itself as an implacable enemy of the ANC, and on this
basis, to try to convince the supporters of the National Party to switch their
allegiance to itself. It therefore has no choice but itself to adopt reactionary
positions aimed at protecting the privileges of the constituency it is
struggling to secure for itself.

Accordingly, the NP and the DP are engaged in a desperate struggle to
out-compete each other in a race which they believe will be won by whoever
convinces the white minority that they are the most reliable and best defenders
of white privilege.

Where this competition becomes counter-productive to the fundamental
objectives of these two parties of white privilege, they show no hesitation to
combine efforts as they are about the do as the government of the Western
Cape.

Similarly, and not surprisingly, they both believe that their fortunes lie
not so much in policies they can propagate, but in their success in projecting
themselves as tireless fighters for the defeat of the ANC.

We say not surprisingly, because, in reality over the last three years,
neither of these parties has produced any credible policies with which they can
challenge the vision for the renewal of our country contained in our
Reconstruction and Development Programme.

Indeed, we must expect that even in the forthcoming campaign for the 1999
elections, these parties will base their offensive not on any policy
alternatives but on vilification of the ANC.

For its part, the Freedom Front has remained imprisoned in its narrow
nationalist pursuit of so-called "Afrikaner self-determination".

However, the Freedom Front has also recognised the fact that it can only
advance its cause by reaching agreement with the ANC.

Because the correct solution of the national question in our country remains
at the centre of the mission of our movement, we have continued and will
maintain our dialogue with the Freedom Front to address the legitimate cultural,
language and other concerns of those among the Afrikaner people who have these
concerns.

The latest political grouping to join the miserable platoon of opponents of
our movement is the United Democratic Movement of Bantu Holomisa and Roelf
Meyer, former bed-fellows as functionaries of the apartheid system and its
security forces.

Once more, this grouping predicates its success not on any challenge to our
policies. It hopes and prays for significant dissatisfaction among our
supporters, occasioned by any failure on our part to implement these
policies.

More vigorously than the Democratic Party, it also seeks to convince some
supporters of the National Party that the UDM offers a more credible non-racial
political home than the NP.

Inevitably, it will draw into its ranks some of the most backward and corrupt
elements in our society which have no interest whatsoever in promoting the
interests of the people. Thus, the presence of leaders of criminal gangs at its
founding conference was no accident.

We must also expect that some from this group will seek to promote its
interests by resort to criminal violence against the people, especially members
and supporters of the ANC and the rest of the democratic movement.

At the same time, efforts will be made to infiltrate agents of the UDM into
the structures of our movement to try to destroy us from within and to gather
information which will be used to try to discredit the movement.

Furthermore, elements of the Third Force will not hesitate to link up with
members of the UDM to further a common counter-revolutionary agenda.

Ultimately, the objectives of the United Democratic Movement and the National
Party, in particular, converge around the one objective critical to both - the
destruction of the ANC. As it happens, the leaders of both groups owe their
political origins to a common apartheid home.

It is inevitable that, in the course, they will coalesce into one
formation.

We serve in the national and KwaZulu-Natal governments with the Inkatha
Freedom Party. These governments are working well without any serious tensions,
regardless of the differences that exist between us and the IFP, on various
questions.

Further, our two organisations are involved in a joint effort to consolidate
peace in the country and to encourage a culture of tolerance and non-violent
political competition among our respective members and supporters.

More fundamentally, our two organisations have a responsibility to cooperate
to ensure the achievement of the objectives contained in the Reconstruction and
Development Programme, which they have jointly striven to attain over the last
three years, as the government of our country.

We also need to recall that many members of the IFP grew up in the ANC and
many of the people the IFP leads were educated in the politics of the African
National Congress. Furthermore we share the same constituency, especially the
rural and urban poor.

All this argues for the need for both the ANC and the IFP not to allow
whatever issues they disagree about, to stand in the way of their cooperation to
achieve the genuine emancipation of all our people.

The challenge continues to confront both AZAPO and the PAC to abandon the
illusion that, as organisations, they can be significant factors in the
continuing struggle for the genuine liberation of the people.

The decision finally to play a constructive role in this struggle rests which
the members of these organisations.

The prophets of doom have reemerged in our country. In 1994, these predicted
that the transition to democracy would be attended by a lot of bloodshed.

Disappointed in their expectations by what actually happened, they
nevertheless never abandoned their resolve to spread despair. Th pivot of their
offensive is that the history of Africa is a history of failure and
disaster.

Accordingly, they adhere to the openly racist position that a South Africa
led by the African National Congress and no longer under white minority rule,
will, inevitably sink into failure and disaster.

And so they go about their business to high-light and elevate anything that
is negative. Neither do they hesitate to tell lies or to invent stories so long
as this advances their purposes.

They also work in a determined manner to ensure that the truth is never told
about the important advances that have been and are being made to improve the
standard of living and the quality of life of all South Africans.

Their task is to spread messages about an impending economic collapse,
escalating corruption in the public service, rampant and uncontrollable crime, a
massive loss of skills through white emigration and mass demoralisation among
the people either because they are white and therefore threatened by the ANC and
its policies which favour black people, or because they are black and
consequently forgotten because the ANC is too busy protecting white
privilege.

A massive propaganda campaign has been conducted on the issue of crime, in
many instances without any regard and respect for the truth. We will ourselves
discuss this matter because of our own serious concern radically to bring down
the levels of crime. However, what is necessary is that anybody genuinely
committed to this goal should make an objective study of this problem and avoid
the serious distortions which result from this exploitation of this issue for
partisan political purposes.

Such a study for example will show that for Johannesburg murder, attempted
murder and culpable homicide taken together, have been declining steadily since
1994. Facts and figures actually disprove the notion that there has been a rapid
escalation of these crimes and confirm that we inherited the high levels of
these crimes from the apartheid system.

This study would also show that these crimes occur in the black and the white
lower income-group areas. Murder in the wealthier and therefore white areas of
Johannesburg accounts for around 10 per cent of the total for the city as a
whole.

Accordingly and first and foremost, the murder and related figures reflect
the desperate socio-economic condition of the communities with a high incidence
of these crimes which can only be brought down significantly as these conditions
of life of the people in these areas improve in a meaningful and sustained
manner.

Calls for the restoration of the death penalty are, in reality, calls to hang
those who are black and poor and who, in the main, commit murder among
themselves. Those who make this demand seek to deny the fact that it is the
dehumanising poverty imposed on the people by the apartheid system which
generates this crime.

This study will also show that the murders which occur in the relatively
prosperous white areas, as well as instances of assault with intent to cause
grievous bodily harm, have virtually no connection with robbery and theft in all
their forms, including car hijacking, where these occur in these white
areas.

Again, the propaganda put out of a rapid escalation of murders in these areas
as a result of the escalation of the crime of robbery is not borne out by the
facts. The image projected that merely to walk in the streets in these white
areas is to invite death and that this has been the case since 1994, is entirely
false.

We can also make similar observations about these matters as they affect the
Cape Town Metropole.

More recently, we have also been subjected to a tremendous barrage of
propaganda and threats of vigilance action occasioned by the murder of white
farmers. Again, the truth about this matter is studiously and systematically
suppressed for political reasons.

In the period January 1 to November 24 this year, 51 crimes occurred on the
Free State farms. During the commission of these crimes, 14 murders occurred,
with only 3 known instances in which the motive was murder. Arrests have been
made for 11 of these murders.

To illustrate the seriousness with which the Police Service has treated these
crimes, the success rate achieved in terms of arrests and convictions amounts to
around 85 per cent. The propaganda that the Go