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President Botha: the King Canute of apartheid
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Pieter Willem Botha
is credited with setting up an autocratic "Imperial Presidency" in South Africa, but in retrospect he was actually the King Canute of apartheid, closing his eyes to the incoming tide of democracy and believing that by wagging his finger (his favoured gesture of intimidation) he could turn it back.
A National Party hack from the age of 20, Botha worked his way up through the ranks, getting elected an MP in 1948 when the first apartheid government took power. He became leader of the National Party in the Cape Province and was promoted through various cabinet posts until he became Minister of Defence , a position he used to launch a palace coup in 1978 against his colleague, Prime Minister John Vorster. Botha immediately set about modernizing apartheid, modifying his own role from that of a British-style prime minister, answerable to parliament, to one of an executive president taking vital decisions in the secrecy of a President's Council heavily weighted with army top brass. Informed by the army that the battle to preserve the apartheid status quo was unwinnable purely by force, Botha embarked on his Total Strategy , which involved reforms to peripheral aspects of apartheid and the fostering of a black middle class as a buffer against the ANC, while pumping vast sums of money into building an enormous military machine that crossed South Africa's borders to bully or crush neighbouring countries into submission. South African refugees in Botswana and Zimbabwe were bombed, Angola was invaded, and arms were run to anti-government rebels in Mozambique, reducing it to ruins - a policy that has returned to haunt South Africa with those same weapons now returning across the border and finding their way into the hands of criminals. Inside South Africa, security forces enjoyed a free hand to murder, maim and torture opponents of apartheid on a scale that only fully emerged between 1996 and 1998, under the investigations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Botha's intransigence led to his greatest blunder in 1985, when he responded to international calls for change by hinting that he would announce significant reforms at his party congress that would irreversibly jettison apartheid. In the event, the so-called Rubicon speech was a disaster, as Botha proved to have insufficient steel to resist pressure from white right-wing extremists. The speech shrank away from meaningful concessions to black South Africans, the immediate result of which was a flight of capital from the country and intensified sanctions. Perhaps worst of all for the apartheid regime, the Chase Manhattan Bank refused to roll over its massive loan to South Africa, leaving the country an uncreditworthy pariah. Botha blustered and wagged his finger at the opposition through the late 1980s, while his bloated military sucked the state coffers dry as it prosecuted its dirty wars. Even National Party stalwarts realized that his policies were leading to ruin, and in 1989, when he suffered a stroke, the party was quick to replace him with F.W. de Klerk , who immediately proceeded to announce the reforms the world had expected four years earlier from Botha's Rubicon speech.
Botha lives out his retirement near George where, it is reported, he still harbours deep resentments against his National Party colleagues, whom he believes betrayed him. He has declined to apologize for any of the brutal actions taken under his presidency to bolster apartheid and, despite being subpoenaed, he refused to testify before the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
, which led in 1998 to him being prosecuted and fined for contempt. In 1999, his appeal against this judgement was successful. Other useful information
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