Pretoria Official Rejects Black-White Power Sharing for Natal Province

A plan to share political power between South Africa’s black majority and its white minority in Natal province was firmly rejected by a key government minister Sunday in a move that could mean the death of liberal white efforts at political reform.

Stoffel Botha, the Natal provincial leader of the ruling National Party and the country’s minister of home affairs, said the proposal for a one-man, one-vote system in the province is unacceptable because it would lead to “total domination” of whites by blacks--despite extensive legal safeguards in the plan to protect white interests.

The only constitutional system that the National Party could accept, whether for Natal or for the country as a whole, is one that provides, equal “group rights” for whites and blacks, Botha declared. Whites are outnumbered 5 to 1 in South Africa.

System Ruled Out

Botha categorically ruled out any political system that gives a majority party, whatever its electoral support, sole executive and legislative authority, whether in a province or in the country as a whole.

The power-sharing constitution proposed on Friday for Natal, however, includes not only veto powers for the white and Asian minorities but also ensures them at least three seats in the 11-member provincial cabinet.

The proposal would require approval by South Africa’s Nationalist-controlled Parliament, and Natal officials have said they believe it should also be ratified in a provincial referendum to give it clear legitimacy.

The complex proposal, the result of eight months of tough negotiations and hard-won compromises by representatives of 36 moderate groups in Natal, is by far the boldest effort to find a way out of South Africa’s deepening political, economic and social crisis.

In proposing a multiracial government with extensive checks and balances, the Natal plan seeks to balance white fears about “black domination” in a system of majority rule with the growing demands by both blacks and liberal whites for a system based on individual equality ensuring all their full rights.

Ending Minority Rule

If adopted, it would end both minority white rule and the remnants of racial segregation in the province, which runs along South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast.

Botha’s rejection of the plan appears to be aimed, also, at any other efforts to find a solution to the country’s crisis except those attempts ordained by the National Party.

Peter Gastrow, chairman of the white opposition Progressive Federal Party and its chief representative at the Natal constitutional conference, said the government’s reaction virtually kills chances of a peaceful solution to the country’s problems through such negotiations.

Botha’s rejection of the proposal, widely hailed by both English and Afrikaans-language newspapers on Sunday, is the “reaction from bigots who seem to have a death wish for South Africa,” Gastrow said. It is an insult to Natal’s 7 million people, he added, and makes “asses” of black and white moderates seeking peaceful change through political negotiation.

‘No Chance’ for Talks

“The government now has no possible chance to get any negotiations going,” Gastrow said. “As a result, confrontation will probably form the pattern of politics in the future.”

Only 10 days ago the Nationalists used their majority in the President’s Council, a key advisory body, to shelve for at least six months far-reaching proposals to liberalize the racial segregation of residential areas and public facilities.

The Natal constitutional conference, called the Indaba, using the Zulu word for meeting, proposed that the province have a two-chamber legislature with the 100-member lower house elected on the basis of one man, one vote and a 50-member upper house elected to represent group interests.

Legislation would have to be passed by both houses, but the leader of the majority party in the lower chamber, undoubtedly a black, would become provincial prime minister and choose the Cabinet. Whites and Indians would have veto power over any legislation affecting their “language, religion or culture,” and all would be protected by a strong bill of rights guaranteeing civil liberties.

Decentralizing Government

Implicit in the plan is a federal system for South Africa that would allow other provinces and regions to work out their own arrangements for sharing political power between blacks and whites. It would inevitably diminish the authority of the central government, which the National Party has controlled since 1948, unless it also developed a new constitutional system.

The Indaba’s plan has the backing of Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the powerful Zulu leader, whose Inkatha political movement is strong in Natal. It is also supported by many moderate white groups, including the Progressive Federal Party and the smaller New Republic Party.

However, there were immediate objections from the country’s political left.

The United Democratic Front, a coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups with 3 million members, and the outlawed African National Congress both rejected the proposal. They said it was a diversion from their struggle to end South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule nationwide.

Afrikaners Vote ‘No’

The National Party, which holds an increasingly fragile franchise on white political power because of challenges from both right and left, participated only as an observer in the Natal conference. Two Afrikaans groups voted against the power-sharing plan, the only groups to do so although others abstained.

For the government, the matter was so sensitive that, until Botha spoke on national television, officials would only say that the plan would get careful study but that time was needed to evaluate all of its provisions. Informed sources had said the plan might well be “studied to death,” in the words of one, until the Nationalists had a counter-proposal.

Agreement on the proposal late Friday had apparently taken J. Christian Heunis, the minister of constitutional development and planning, by surprise. Only a few days earlier, he told political commentators that the Indaba’s participants were too divided to reach such a consensus.