South Africa still divided by race - De Klerk

Former president FW De Klerk, who negotiated the end of the oppressive white-minority regime his party created, has warned that South African democracy is being undercut by the same racial divides as a decade ago.

“Our democracy, although stable, is not very healthy,” De Klerk said as South Africa celebrated 10 years since apartheid’s demise.

As campaigning begins for the country’s third all-race elections, on April 14, race and ethnicity remain the defining factors in party politics, De Klerk says.

The ruling African National Congress is assured a sweeping victory in a country where blacks represent some 75% of the 45 million people, leaving minority-based parties to fight it out over a small slice of government.

“I would have liked to see more of a realignment of politics … to a much more value-based dispensation,” he said at his Cape Town-based foundation, aimed at promoting reconciliation.

Despite lingering challenges, however, De Klerk believes the country is on the right track. The economy is growing and remarkable goodwill exists between South Africa’s different peoples, he says.

With time, he predicts, political alliances will form around policy positions and the ANC will lose its overwhelming influence.

“The ANC alliance, with its two-thirds of the vote, was based on a common purpose, and that was the end of the apartheid system,” he said.

“That cement is gone.”

67-year-old De Klerk stunned the world when he released Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison and legalised Mandela’s ANC within six months of coming to power in 1989.

De Klerk then engaged in negotiations that ended white-minority rule and saw Mandela elected South Africa’s first black president in April 1994.

His efforts won him a share of the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela in 1993, but they also cost his National Party its place at the pinnacle of power.

Unable to shrug off its apartheid history, the renamed New National Party saw its share of the vote fall from more than 20% in 1994 to less than 7% in 1999.

De Klerk served as deputy president in a power-sharing government led by Mandela but quit the post in 1996 and resigned as party leader a year later, saying he wanted to help the National Party break with the past.