In a striking historical irony, the ANC’s defiant rhetoric against Western sanctions eerily mirrors PW Botha’s failed 1986 stance, while the party’s romanticised invocation of Codesa for today’s National Dialogue fundamentally misunderstands how apartheid actually ended – through backroom bilateral negotiations, not public consultation, writes Tony Leon.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”, is a phrase attributed in the 1870’s to Mark Twain, the polymath American novelist and essayist.

More earthily and relatively recently, in the 1970s, back when “dead tree media” held the ring here in the form of print newspapers, the Sunday Times, then read by millions, ran a weekly contest called “spot the difference”.

Readers, especially bored preteens, were invited to carefully examine two similar pictures placed in adjoining panels. The trick was to identify subtle, small differences between the two, even though at first blush, they appeared identical.

Today, but with far higher stakes at risk and apparent adults in charge, “spot the difference” is the new-old game of choice for the SA political elite.

Thus, last week, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula was in truculent, finger-waving defiance as he attacked the West, particularly the United States.

Mbalula stated, in a media briefing after his party’s recent NEC meeting, that “the ANC will not be coerced into reversing its ‘progressive transformation laws’.”

He added:

“If it means we are going to suffer through sanctions as leaders of the ANC, let it be. We will never back imperialists to subvert our democracy, to subvert our sovereignty.”

Mystifyingly, Mbalula added that “it happened during the period of struggle, it will happen even now. We will never forsake our country which we fought for its liberation. Not this ANC…”

Precisely what happened “during the period of struggle” was the time when another occupant of state power here, President PW Botha, used eerily almost the same formula of words to set his face against an interfering West, particularly the United States, seeking to use its vast economic leverage to pressure change in SA.

Here, it requires a deep dive to spot the difference between Mbalula in 2025 and PW Botha in 1986.

Thirty-nine years ago, in August 1986, addressing his National Party congress in Durban, Botha thundered that the NP would “throw off the yoke of negative foreign interference… those who are demanding unacceptable concessions through blackmail and manipulated world opinion should not underestimate us”.

His final note of defiance could have been scripted last week by Mbalula. Botha said back then:

“We do not desire sanctions, but if we have to suffer sanctions for the sake of maintaining freedom, justice and order, we will survive them-we will emerge stronger on the other side.”

History records – in plain prose and not in rhyme – that within one month of that speech, the US Congress duly obliged with the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, ironically willed on by the ANC lobby in the US Capitol. One month later, despite president Ronald Reagan’s veto, the bill was enacted.

Far from either surviving the wide-ranging sanctions embedded in the legislation, SA buckled and was massively weakened.

In less than four years, economic isolation and crippling financial disinvestment forced the hand of Botha’s successor, FW de Klerk, to introduce the precise changes willed by the US and bitterly opposed by Botha. This pressure, far more than any battlefield success by the ANC, was the key which helped unlock the door of change.

One wonders how effective and determinative the current pressure from a very different US Congress today might be on a very different government in South Africa, if the US legislature votes to advance the bill proposing a full-scale review, including sanctions, of US-SA bilateral relations.

Of course, no two historical episodes are identical. They might rhyme but don’t always match each other.

The ANC, when not railing against the West, is expert at panel beating apartheid and the struggle period Mbalula invokes to fit any range of wildly divergent geostrategic arenas, however inapt the pairing: from Palestine/Israel to Morocco/Western Sahara.

No matter the differences in history, geography and populations, in the ANC worldview, one struggle fits all, and apartheid is the stand-in for all manner of villains in its demonology: from Jewish Israel to Muslim Morocco and many places and polities in between.

Call back the past 

Appropriately, perhaps, the new version of “spot the difference” is now played by linking today’s dismal economics and broken politics with the “golden era” of constitutional negotiations in South Africa.

“Call back the past” (also a popular 1970s radio show) is now in vogue in the hope that the sepia-tinged mythology of the 1990s can be wheeled out to rescue the country from the multiple crises confronting it, even when some leading lights draw the wrong conclusions on how change occurred and how it was affected.

At least though there is a rare moment of agreement about the depth of the crisis. Last week, the ANC declared the economy to be in “a state of emergency”. On Monday, DA leader John Steenhuisen placed the economy “in ICU” (intensive care). He suggested a raft of measures to resuscitate it and slammed the ANC’s suggested National Dialogue as worse than a placebo, but a mere “talk shop, a national monologue”.

The explicit referencing of the stumbling and very expensive “national dialogue” to the both the past constitutional negotiations and the instruments that advanced it, has been very striking. And it is also strikingly misleading.

This column has noted before how inapt a fit the Codesa analogy is for today’s circumstances. In 1991, there was no democratic parliament, the majority sat outside state power, and the government itself possessed massive power and scant legitimacy. The Codesa process was a rickety, at times abandoned, bridge intended to stopgap the vast chasm between two contending forces: the system and the struggle against it.

While there were full-scale plenaries, working groups and two years of on-and-off wranglings, most of the final passage of the interim constitution happened in back rooms and via backstairs negotiations involving a handful of people.

The open sessions were useful for letting off steam and public posturing. Much of the result was owed to bilateral discussions between two parties, the NP and ANC. Even the language of Codesa, which theoretically reached its decisions based on sufficient consensus, was defined by ANC negotiator Cyril Ramaphosa as meaning “when the NP and ANC agree, everyone else can get stuffed”. Crude but true.

Institutional memory

Repurposing Roelf Meyer as an “eminent person” for today’s National Dialogue, (he has long stepped outside party politics and the NP sits in the elephant’s graveyard of history) offers little clue, beyond a dash of nostalgia, on prospects for success of the current “talk shop” as Steenhuisen dubs it.

Meyer, though, brings to the table the institutional memory of a history he witnessed.

Another “eminent person” involved in the dialogue is former politician Lindiwe Mazibuko, though she was still at school when both Codesa and its successor, the Constitutional Assembly (1994 to 1996), were convened, and which finalised the draft of the current Constitution.

Reading Mazibuko’s lyrical invocation of the “public dialogue” embarked on by the Constitutional Assembly in 1994 as a template for the operations of the current national dialogue struck me as a sincere but misplaced example of wishful thinking.

She wrote in the Sunday Times: “All things considered, the two-year consultation process was an unparalleled success in national engagement, generating nearly 2 million submissions.”

Other than her quantitative analysis, there is little from that process which offers any useful guide for present or future purpose.

The real negotiations which birthed the current Constitution, in the end owed final passage to another series of backroom engagements, often conducted between precisely two people in a so called “(back) channel” – Meyer and Ramaphosa.

On occasions, other party leaders and leading figures were brought in especially when deadlocks arose around key clauses. On one occasion we were airlifted, out of public and media view to a SANDF missile site at Arniston on the Cape coast. The two million public submissions might have weighed with some background influence, but were barely referenced when the hard negotiations were in play.

I wrote a contemporaneous account of these negotiations as a direct participant in them. I recalled these observations in my 2008 book On the Contrary:

“The Constitutional Assembly mounted a publicity drive to ‘take the Constitution to the people’. This was done at a cost of over R35m [Note the ZAR/US $ then exchange was R3.55/ I US$ versus R17.62/I US$ today]. Whether a single clause or section was altered as a consequence of public pressure is doubtful. For example, the majority of representations and petitions by ordinary citizens and groups signalled the public’s overwhelming support for capital punishment; but this made no difference whatsoever to the final outcome.”

Indeed, reprise this exercise today, thirty plus crime ravaged years later and true public opinion will reveal the same sentiment, but with doses of anti-foreign migrant sentiment fury laced in.

So, if there is to be an honest and open public dialogue, then be honest and open on acting on majoritarian views, or else confine the decision-making to elite opinion formers who can screen out sentiments that go against the grain of political correctness. You simply cannot have both.

And these popular/populist hit numbers (death sentence restoration and expelling foreigners) will pale by comparison if the national dialogue does a proper pulse-taking of public sentiment on ANC holy cows, ranging from BEE to deploying corrupt cadres. No doubts on the outcomes here, a brace of public opinion polls has given us the answer. Except the same ANC has also advised these are non-negotiable.

“A national engagement of unparalleled success” suggested by Mazibuko, is a doubtful historic precedent.

It might not repeat itself, though it eerily rhymes with our true, though much misremembered, past.