Depoliticisation was in session, to the comprehending and the non-comprehending alike, when FW De Klerk was made joint recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela. Nothing could be a better-prized cleansing ceremony than that for De Klerk to immunise him. The Idea of Prosecuting De Klerk, and what he represents and represented, presented the quandary of visiting the very sins of atrocities he presided over a Nobel Peace Laureate.
De Klerk was now wearing cleansed robes of nobility in 1993, along with Mandela for his picture to claim pride of place to hang on the wall of Nobel Peace Prize Committee offices’ wall.
De Klerk falls in line for status to be in league of:
- Albert Luthuli (1960) for his “non-violent” struggle against the apartheid regime;
- Desmond Tutu (1984) for his role as a voice of conscience and leader in the “peaceful” campaign against apartheid;
- Nelson Mandela (1993) for the “peaceful” termination of apartheid and laying the foundations for a democratic South Africa;
- Navanethem “Navi” Pillay (2026) for her extensive work in international justice, human rights, and accountability for war crimes and genocide.
Posthumously, De Klerk has the FW De Klerk Foundation to keep his legacy alive into perpetuity with a good name to ensure compliance with constitutionality, and has a credible right of way now to rub shoulders with other foundations passing it fit to convene a National Dialogue (ND) along with other foundations: Oliver Tambo, Steve Biko, Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe, Robert Mangaliso, etc., to collectively define ‘the SA we want and the SA we do not want’.
In preparation for this National Dialogue, Roelf Meyer, also SA Ambassador to the US, is distinguished as one of the Eminent Persons.
Former FW De Klerk Foundation CEO Paul Hoffman runs his own outfit, Accountability Now, and is the go-to commentator on legal, constitutional and prosecutorial matters and accountability.
Institute of Security Studies (ISS) is now the continent-wide and international outfit to speak on security, stability and investment prospects.
The good past and present actors of SA political age are mingling as equal, undisputed cast members of inadvertent depoliticisation unfolding right in front of the eyes of ordinary people as well as extraordinary leaders.
That is how bothersome, bewildering and bewitching depoliticisation found footing to see Wikipedia recording Helen Zille as anti-apartheid as Steve Biko.
The Zille ‘anti-apartheid record’ has been milked to be a cleansing purgative to wash her uninterrupted white privilege, to blow a moral whistle on corruption of the ANC that is nevertheless both externally sponsored as well as self-inflicted but accentuated to drill corruption as uniquely a black thing – whiteness is incapable of – as unfitness to govern to criminalise black majority rule and liberating black power.
In this depoliticisation spree, ‘service delivery’ is a vocation in town for all else to claim their pound of flesh that makes even the Freedom Front buoyantly exhibit their blacks as much as the DA does to make a plaything of blackness. Moreover, this is done to toy with the black condition in which black people have become poster girls and boys for the protection of white privilege in the name of democracy and the illusion of choice.
Ngwenya is a writer and corporate strategist.
