"Opposition Then and Now and in the Future"
Twenty five years ago this week, on 6 September 1989, I was elected for the first time to South Africa's Parliament. Admittedly, this event was of greater moment to me personally and, just perhaps, to my constituents in Houghton, Johannesburg, who had entrusted their parliamentary interests to a then 32-year old local city councillor, than to the nation.
South Africa was back then a country at war with itself - and largely isolated from the world which had turned its back on the apartheid state. The central feature of politics then was the failure of government to set in train the basis for a negotiated resolution of democratic rights for the majority, who at the time of my election were excluded from the magic circle reserved for whites (and in lesser form for Indians and Coloureds) to freely choose their public representatives to institutions which mattered.
Even the centrality of the sovereign parliament to which I had just been elected to enact meaningful legislation and process executive regulations was deeply contested, and not simply by the extra-parliamentary opposition at home, in the form of the surging United Democratic Front (UDF) and the liberation movements, principally the African National Congress (ANC) in exile and in prison . A previous leader of my party, Dr Van Zyl Slabbert had dramatically resigned less than four years before the hinge-of-history 1989 election declaring that the parliament to which I had just been elected was " a hopelessly flawed and failed constitutional experiment..(which) does not begin to solve the problem of political domination; in fact it compounds it."
The Democratic Party (DP) , on whose ticket I had been elected, broadly agreed with this analysis but believed that the legal platforms for participation should be used to fight for change. However, while retrospect makes the pathway forward seem obvious, there were no clear indications in September 1989 that South Africa was about to undergo the most profound change in centuries.
The most important consequence of that election was the inauguration of a new state president. I arrived in parliament directly from lecturing at the University of Witwatersrand. The reason for the overwhelming white face of the student body was a result of government policy enforced by its conservative education minister, named FW De Klerk. Thus when parliament gathered for its first sitting day on 2 February 1990, to listen to President de Klerk, few on the opposition benches inside and the far mightier anti-NP forces outside, had any great expectation of change.