Constitution history

The politics of reform and repression

In June 1976 the government met its fiercest resistance yet from students protesting against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of education. Several hundred students were killed in the uprisings that ensued and South Africa became a focus of attention throughout the world as apartheid was condemned internationally. Thousands left the country to join the liberation movements, and the armed struggle gained momentum. The government was obliged to prove willingness to reform.

Upon coming to power in 1978, Prime Minister (and later President) P. W. Botha began reorganizing the state. One of the significant developments was the creation of a new government department, Department of Constitutional Development and Planning. This department was mandated to introduce 'reforms' while the security establishment took over the major strategic decision-making responsibilities of the state (Swilling & Phillips,1989:114). This unusual delegation of tasks was given effect through the creation of a multi-tiered, interdepartmental structure dominated by the military but staffed by civilians, called the National Security Management System (NSMS). The role of the NSMS was to address economic and social problems in local 'hotspots', in a designed to win the support of the populace in a given area. The idea was that this would isolate those responsible for 'political unrest' and leave them to the mercy of the state's repressive might.

As part of Botha's reform strategy, the next major constitutional development took place in 1983, in the form of a new Tricameral Parliament and a President's Council. Parliament was made up of three houses: the white House of Assembly, the coloured House of Representatives, and the Indian House of Delegates. Africans were excluded from this dispensation. Differences between the three houses were referred to the President's Council.

Botha's regime was characterized by a dual approach to the growing militancy of the anti-apartheid forces - reform and repression. It was a method informed by Botha's militarized style of government, learnt while in office as Minister of Defence, and drawing on the strategies of the military dictatorships of Latin America.

The NSMS, which was initiated in 1979, and the 1983 constitution reforms initiated by Chris Heunis, Minister of Constitutional Affairs and Planning, were manifestations of a shift in National Party (NP) thinking and strategy. While maintaining the apartheid project, the NP had begun to focus more closely on other cleavages that could be exploited within the black community. The reform packages that characterized the 1980s were aimed at creating a group of 'urban insiders', which were a small, privileged African elite who could act as a buffer against the majority of black South Africans (Cock & Nathan, 1989:139). This was the aim that informed both the Riekert and Wiehahn Commissions and the 1983 constitution.

The reform and repression approach employed by the NP, at its most sophisticated in the form of the NSMS, created a brief respite for the Botha regime, for it was able to quell some of the political turmoil of the mid-eighties, and to illustrate the sophisticated might of the apartheid state. In retrospect, it appears that at this point in South Africa's history an impasse had been reached. The NSMS clearly showed the military might of the South African regime, ruling out the possibility of any successful military victory by the anti-apartheid forces. On the other hand, real tensions were developing within the state itself as securocrats and political reformers began plotting different trajectories for South Africa's future.

The strategy of reform and repression had only limited success. Armed resistance intensified, and by 1984 armed actions had risen to an average of fifty operations per year. In 1985 the ANC first deployed landmines and began to develop a presence in rural areas. The organization declared 1986 the year of the people's army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). As alternative township structures, street committees, and people's courts began functioning in many areas, the state, whose agenda was dominated by insurrectionary politics, was struggling to govern much of the country. The next step for the resistance was 'the transformation of armed propaganda into a people's war'. The Bethal trial of ANC underground activists exposed the elaborate plans the ANC had developed for its revolutionary warfare (Moss,1988:3). From 1986 onwards the number of attacks rose to between 250 and 300 per year. It was also during this period that a vigorous debate arose within the liberation movement between those who argued for an 'insurrectionary people's war' and those who wanted a war to force the regime to the negotiating table (Lodge,1989:42).

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