REACTION ON COMMENTS BY MINISTER BLADE NZIMANDE REGARDING THE FOUNDATION
The FW de Klerk Foundation has taken note of Minister Blade Nzimande's recent comments regarding the Foundation and other organizations that are seeking to uphold the constitutional rights of South African citizens. The Minister refers to us as a "liberal conservative" organization. He presumably regards both liberalism and conservatism as negative terms, but he is quite right.
We are a liberal organization in the sense that we unambiguously support all the individual rights and values set out in the Constitution. We unashamedly believe in individual freedom; in free markets; the freedom of expression and in a free and independent judiciary. We also support communal rights that have their roots in all the rich traditions and cultures of our diverse society.
In addition, we prefer pragmatic approaches based on the experience and accumulated wisdom of our and other societies, rather than the ideological ‘human engineering' approaches favoured by others. In this sense we are also a conservative organization. The Minister also refers to us as "an all-white organization". This is not true. Our Board includes respected members from all our communities.
We have a completely non-racial approach to the appointment of staff members and require only that they should all support the Constitution. Although we find it distasteful to label our employees in racial terms, we have employed black and coloured staff and a majority of the interns have been of black or Asian origin.
One of our senior black employees left us to spend more time with her family and another left us to become a researcher to a constitutional court judge. We could have appointed excellent black candidates to key posts, but unfortunately did not have the financial resources to pay the market-related salaries that they asked for.