The former Deputy President of the democratic government of South Africa, Mr F.W De Klerk, on 07/03/2012, wrote an article detailing his rushed thoughts around the proposed political paradigm shift by the ANC's policy discussion document entitled "The Second Transition". In this article, Mr De Klerk expresses his understanding of the political settlement reached between the warring sections of our society at the height of political conflict in our country after 1990.
In this article, Mr De Klerk makes it clear as a former leader of the National Party, and may be above all as part of the white minority group in South Africa, that he does not agree with the ANC's proposed stance to deviate from the political settlement reached during the political negotiations in the 1990's.
For Mr De Klerk it seems, the political settlement reached during those negotiations is sacrosanct and should not be tempered with irrespective of the forward march and changing historical phenomena. As a zealous sentinel of this settlement, he also finds himself duty-bound to dispense thinly-veiled threats of a minority backlash if this settlement were to be tempered with.
Mr De Klerk also finds solace in the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, in the late 1980's, and the meteoric rising of the current dominant neo-liberal economic ideology that has put emphasis on fiscal austerity and other economic policy measures designed to ensure a thriving environment for maximisation of profit by business.
Conspicuously, he says zilch about the 2008 global economic meltdown and the resultant loss of millions of jobs due to the ill-conceived neoliberal economic policies. What about the current Euro-zone economic crisis? He neatly avoids this subject for obvious reasons.
He concludes by ringing the usual liberal scarecrow bells about the ANC's supposed scaling down of the powers of independent courts, ostensibly to raise the ire of anyone caring about the rule of law in our country. All this is designed to support Mr De Klerk's fictional warning about the supposedly imminent South African apocalypse!