by Richard Chidowore This is this is the first in a four-part series on South Africa elections
The date for South Africa’s first all-race election nears, the level of violence, intimidation and the growing demand for separate states by lnkatha and remnants of the Afrikaner Volksfront (AVF) threatens to disrupt the process.
Of the political parties that have registered, 27 parties would compete for seats in one or more of the nine provincial parliaments while 18 would contest the national election for an all inclusive constituent assembly.
The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a member of the now defunct Freedom Alliance (FA), failed to meet the 4.30pm deadline on 9 March to submit its election candidates, while the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) submitted amendments to its candidates list an hour after the deadline.
lnkatha is the only major black party to boycott the election and printing of 80 million ballot papers began on 12 March without it. A London firm, Thomas De La Rue, contracted to print the ballot papers, says it will take a month to print the papers.
The Zulu-based party is demanding international mediation on constitutional disputes as a condition for participating in the elections.
A splinter group of the AVF, the Freedom Front (FF), is set to contest the election after narrowly beating the deadline to register its candidates.
The FF is led by retired army general Constant Viljoen, who resigned as chairman of the AVF which is boycotting the election.
Viljoen said he had been urged by his supporters to fight the election, so that they would have a party to vote for, rather than to join the AVF’s boycott.
Another FA member, President Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana, was deposed as leader of the nominally independent homeland by the Transitional Executive Committee (TEC) and the South African government. Mangope’ s fall follows a week of rioting by pro-election demonstrators which left more than 50 people dead.
A number of concessions have been made by the National Party (NP) government and the African National Congress (ANC) to woo the lnkatha and AVF to participate in the elections. These include one of Buthelezi’s key demands of a two-ballot system and changing all references to Natal in the interim constitution to KwaZululNatal.
The Negotiating Council also conceded to the setting up of a Volkstaat Council, a body consisting of20 members elected by Members of Parliament who support the establishment of a white homeland, to take the matter further after the April elections.
Despite these efforts to draw them into the election, both black and white conservatives still refuse to participate, claiming the concessions are insufficient.
The level of violence has also increased in the runup to the election. In the countries worst massacre this year, gunmen shot and stabbed to death 15 sleeping ANC supporters in Natal on 19 February.
The victims, mostly youths, were attending a voter education workshop. The bloodbath came a week after 12people were massacred in the same province in a weekend that saw 27 deaths in a spate of bloody attacks.
The two massacres in Natal and other killings in the townships suggests that the possibility of ) violence disrupting polling in major parts of the country is real.
President Frederik W. de Klerk has said voting may not take place in areas of extreme violence. Violence poses a serious challenge to the multi-racial TEC, which has to work with the present government to ensure South Africans are free to elect a new government of their choice.
Disruption of the election on a sufficiently large scale could confront the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) — an important component of the TEC — with the difficult decision of deciding whether the poll should be considered free and fair.
The IEC is responsible for educating the voters, monitoring the campaigns, ensuring that parties adhere to an electoral code of conduct and managing the actual vote.
Also being challenged by the escalating violence is the National Peacekeeping Force (NPKF) of 10 000 troops drawn from liberation fighters, South African Police, SADF and homeland armies charged with preventing or curbing violence during the election.
Although the peacekeeping force is currently training, it seems highly unlikely that much can be done to improve the security situation before the elections take place.
It is doubtful whether the NPKF will have a disciplined force in time for the elections. The trainees have so far gone on strike, “go slows” and absent-without-Leave overpay disputes, all of which could affect the time plan for deployment of the force.
What is clear is that there is little time to train the 10 OOO-strong peacekeeping force before the elections start.
“To mould these diverse forces a longer training period would have been desirable,” says the Commonwealth Observer Mission to South Africa (COMSA).
The TEC, under which the NPKF falls, has not empowered its commander, General Gabriel Ramushwana, to exercise absolute command, and therefore he cannot prevent some disgruntled soldiers from leaving the base.
The peacekeeping force will work closely with some 2 840 international observers, 1 778 of them provided by the United Nations. Another I 000 monitors will come from the European Union, the Organisation of African Unity and the Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, the SAP intends to recruit 11 000 extra policemen to be deployed in the last two months of the election campaign. The recruits will be part of 60000 policemen on the election beat during the voting.
Deployment of security forces is expected in KwaZulu/Natal region and East Rand townships. For a peaceful election to be held in South Africa, political commentators believe that there is need for a change of heart on the part of the security forces. “They [security forces] should realize that the transitional process is irreversible. They should be agents for change, so that they get into a new South Africa with a new identity,” said a political scientist at a Cape Town university.
State President de Klerk and the NP are being accused of using security forces to orchestrate violence in black townships, allegedly to weaken the ANC in the first all-race elections. The NP is allegedly trying to use violence to intimidate black voters into staying away from the polling stations.
There have been allegations that South African cabinet ministers had “openly boasted” of using a similar strategy prior to Namibia’s independence in 1990 to deny the South West Africa People’s Organization (Swapo) a majority in parliament.
Even though Swapo eventually won the election, it failed to get the two-thirds majority required to write the constitution alone.
The party widely expected to win the South African election — the ANC — promises job creation, improved housing and education, and some taxes cuts in a social justice drive for blacks left behind during years of white-rule apartheid.
The A C manifesto was launched after months of campaigning which centred on “people’s forums”. A C President elson Mandela and other leaders went to public meetings around the country inviting communities to raise their concerns to the leaders.
Observers view this approach as one that is modelled on two ANC strengths: Mandela’s personal stature, and the traditional image of the ANC as a “parliament of the people”, a broadlybased organization that represents a diverse mass constituency.
At the same time, this process provided the ANC leaders a chance to get a feel for the issues that matter most to people.
The ANC, as its list of 200 candidates shows, had to balance the conflicting needs of a diverse constituency, including its alliance partners, by being sensitive to issues such as gender, age, race and region.
The party that opinion polls say is the second largest with about 16 percent of the electorate’s support is the NP which is pushing the argument that the April. Elections are “about the future, not the past”.
However, the past continues to haunt the party that hatched apartheid way back in 1948.
“De Klerk’s spin doctors cannot hope to convince even a fraction of the black majority that the NP Was not responsible for the horrors of apartheid.
Each time the NP picks a fight about the past, it will get a bloody nose,” writes Shaun Johnson, Deputy Editor of the South African Star newspaper.
With the fall of Manrope in Bophuthatswana, millions of blacks in the homeland are now set to participate in South Africa’s first multi-racial general elections. Their quest to vote was for the first time supported by the homeland soldiers and police.
The defeat of the Bophuthatswana government, despite backing from 5,000 armed white right-wingers, is a clear indication that those forces against change do not have the capacity and resources to disrupt the election. (SARDC)
