Madam Speaker, the last apartheid president of South Africa, Mr F W de Klerk, has been very vocal in the past months about his concern for the country. He has voiced his defence of the Bantustan policies, his view that blacks in the homelands were not disenfranchised and that he would have acted decisively in the current education textbooks crisis.
This is the same De Klerk who, during the negotiation processes for our freedom, employed stalling tactics in the hope that he would share power, who negotiated in bad faith and was contradictory to the point where, at one stage, President Mandela broke off the negotiations. This is the same man who, as apartheid education Minister, fought through a law empowering the state to impose racial quotas on universities to limit the ratio of black to white students, with subsidy cuts if universities did not comply. He also went further and used state subsidies to hold universities to ransom in order to crack down on anti-apartheid activists and to compel the institutions to report incidents of misconduct to him. This resulted in huge, nationwide protests by academics.
So, it is a bit rich and hypocritical of him and his kind to sit in judgment on the current education system. He was dismissive of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and denied culpability for any apartheid crimes committed on his watch. He has refused to apologise for his role in the apartheid regime, showing no remorse and leading Comrade Mandela to say that "De Klerk has little idea of what democracy means". Those who align themselves with this "great white liberator" expose their true character. [Applause.]