PRESIDENT ZUMA RETURNS TO SECOND PHASE PLAY
South Africans would do well to take note of President Zuma's statement in Parliament yesterday regarding the ANC's plans to "intensify the implementation of affirmative action policies in order to deepen reconciliation and social cohesion in our country." The President did not grab these ideas from the air - they are a core element of the second phase of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution.
FW de Klerk warned the public about the ANC's intentions in a speech that he delivered on 31 January at the Foundation's annual conference in Cape Town. In his comments De Klerk summarised the main elements of the NDR as follows:
"The ANC sees itself, not as an ordinary political party, but as a national liberation movement with an uncompleted revolutionary mandate. It sees "the continuing legacy of colonialism and white minority rule" as the "defining reality of our society."
"Unlike its negotiating partners, the ANC did not view the constitutional negotiations as the means to achieving a final national constitutional accord. Instead it saw them as a means to achieving a beachhead of state power - which would then enable it to shift the balance of forces further to its own advantage. In the process it admits that it had to make constitutional compromises that it regarded as temporary expedients necessitated by the then prevailing balance of forces."
"The ANC's first priority after the 1994 transition was to shift the balance of forces in its favour by seizing control of the levers of state power. Its targets, in its own words, were "the legislatures, the executives, the public service, the security forces, the judiciary, parastatals, the public broadcaster, and so on". It planned to gain control of these institutions by deploying ANC cadres to leading positions.