Former president and Nobel peace prize winner FW de Klerk said the ANC needed to split, as the country couldn’t be a healthy democracy with just one party.
He urged South Africans to not vote based on ethnicity, but rather vote for a party chosen for their values and policies.
“In the next general election we should not be certain which party will win,” he said, referring to the ANC’s majority.
“We need to break down the historical bonds, which is ethnicity,” said De Klerk, adding that people needed to vote for a party based on the party’s values and policies.
His appearance in Durban yesterday also came in the wake of a controversial interview conducted by CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour. The interview was broadcast on CNN and sparked outrage on networking websites such as Twitter.
Amanpour asked if apartheid failed because it was unworkable or because it was “morally repugnant”. De Klerk said: “There are three reasons. It failed because the whites wanted to keep too much land for themselves, it failed because we (whites and blacks) became economically integrated, and it failed because the majority of blacks said that is not how we want our rights.”
He had also reaffirmed his belief in “separate but equal” nation states. “I don’t apologise for saying that what drove me as a young man, before I decided we need to embrace a new vision, was a quest to bring justice for black South Africans in a way which would not – that’s what I believed then – destroy the justice to which my people were entitled,” he said.
Independent on Saturday