Apartheid leader Pik Botha wants to join ANC

[Ulhas Joglekar]

11 January 2000
Apartheid leader Pik Botha wants to join ANC
JOHANNESBURG: One of the most visible ministers of South Africa's apartheid
era wants to join the African National Congress, the ruling party that
battled to end the country's racist system, a newspaper has reported.
Pik Botha, who was the white regime's foreign minister for 17 years, said in
an interview in Sunday's City Press newspaper that it was time Afrikaners
stopped hiding and worked alongside the Black majority to build a new South
Africa.
``If there are things in the ANC that bother you, you must try to rectify
them from within the ANC,'' Botha told the newspaper. ``The process of
healthy political re-grouping and restructuring will only start when
Afrikaners join the ANC,'' he said, adding the descendants of Dutch and
French settlers could feel at home with ANC policies.
ANC spokesman Smuts Ngonyama said the party had heard rumblings that Botha
was interested in joining. ``We are not surprised at all. We are receptive
to him because it augurs well for nation building,'' Ngonyama said. ``I
think within the spirit of reconciliation, he can play a meaningful role,''
he said.
Former president Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, have
repeatedly called on Afrikaners, who make up more than half the five million
white people living in the country, to help build a better future.
Botha, 68, said Afrikaners could identify with ANC policies, freedom of
religion and the protection of private property. The country's liberal
Constitution also protects Afrikaans as one of several official languages.
``Whites, especially the Afrikaners, must get down from their pedestals,''
Botha told the newspaper.
Botha, no relation to former apartheid President P W Botha, fought a losing
battle to sell the world apartheid as a rational solution to ethnic strife.
The burly Afrikaner has a well-developed instinct for showmanship, but he
failed twice to win the leadership of the National Party, which imposed
apartheid in 1948. (Reuters)
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