By Norm Dixon
JOHANNESBURG — The African National Congress began formally to take the reins of government in South Africa during the past week. On May 7, Tokyo Sexwale was sworn in as premier of the province of Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging or PWV, the country's most economically important.
It was both inspiring and incongruous to see freedom fighters — former exiles and political prisoners — take their seats in the new parliamentary chamber with their former jailers as "Honourable Comrade Members of the House" (as the speaker, the ANC's Trevor Fowler, referred to them).
As the assembly elected Sexwale unopposed as premier, the galleries erupted into cheers and shouts of "Viva". The strains of a freedom song rang out, only to trail off when the strange surroundings seemed to overwhelm the singers. The National Party MPs and the assembled judges, officers and the other white dignitaries, together with their spouses dripping with jewellery, shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
Attention was drawn to the empty seat that would have been that of Susan Keane. Keane was killed by the massive car bomb that exploded near the ANC's national and regional offices just three days before voting began. A minute's silence was observed.
Later at the buffet lunch, communists mingled with uniformed military and police generals, the poorest of township residents sipped champagne with the wealthiest inhabitants of the Johannesburg's ritzy northern suburbs, and former guerilla fighters and teenaged ANC militants shared security duties with hardened members of the South African Police. It must have been the first official government reception in South Africa's history to have the music of Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens as background music.
In his inaugural speech, Premier Sexwale described the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Program as "an unapologetic and unequivocal ... declaration of war against widespread poverty, a war against deprivation and degradation, a war against slum conditions and squalor. In short, a war against the socioeconomic conditions associated with the legacy of apartheid and a one-sided distribution of resources and wealth over many, many years."
The RDP, he said, is a program that "evolves around the provision of basic needs of the people. Homes for the homeless, jobs for the jobless — who in this province are almost 50% of the able-bodied — land for the landless, electrification for those in darkness ... education and affordable health care, sanitation and fresh running water."
Sexwale bade "good riddance to the old order which has been associated with the pain of discrimination and segregation, with the grief of racism and fascism, with the cruelty of institutional hate and apartheid. At this juncture, at this point of no return, nothing and no-one can ever reverse our forward-moving process of democratisation."
He said that all sources of violence "be it political, socioeconomic or criminal", would be addressed to make life in the townships, the city centres and suburbs safe. Sexwale said the ANC was committed to "a clean administration, free from favouritism, nepotism, tsotsiism [gangsterism], factionalism, racism, free from tribalism, against all remnants of apartheid and any form of abuse of power".
The point reached today, said Sexwale, was made possible by the sacrifices of many South Africans. "We lower our flags in their memory. Some died in detention, others in battlefields, the gallows, in exile; others never returned from prison, some have disappeared ... We also remember those South Africans who were part of the security forces who lost their lives in Angola in a war they never understood, a war this country should never have fought."
With Limpho Hani (now an ANC member of the National Assembly) at his side, Sexwale dedicated his inauguration to the assassinated Communist Party leader Chris Hani, "who had to die so suddenly and so violently for everyone to realise the urgency of a democratic election". He also paid tribute to "the masses of our people in all their formations ... All these, black and white, are the true history makers. The democracy that we can now begin to enjoy is the result of their struggles and sacrifices no matter how minute, no matter how pronounced."
Sexwale congratulated Nelson Mandela for his election as South Africa's first democratically elected president. "We wish to send him off with the words from a poem by Father Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest. These words apply to all of us who have just been elected:
Think of those who have died,
when you receive the nomination, the prize, the promotion
Think of those who have died,
when you are in the reception, the delegation or the commission
Think of those who have died,
when they meet you at the airport in a large city
Think of those who died,
when you take the microphone and they focus the television on you ...
Think of those who have died,
see them without a shirt, degraded, bleeding, hooded, crushed, lost in the heap, electric-probe burns, eyes gouged out, beheaded, riddled with bullets,
thrown at the side of the road in holes
that they have dug as common graves
or simply scattered over the earth
fertilising the plains of the mountain
You represent them
They have made you their delegate
those who have died."
Following the ceremony, Sexwale and the ANC parliamentarians travelled to the Phola Park squatters settlement, where the people had organised a huge celebration and feast for their representatives.