Speaker, Mr P W Botha became the Prime Minister of South Africa in 1978. He had a bizarre geopolitical analysis that went something like this: The West and the communist bloc were at war but, because of the threat of mutually assured destruction through the use of nuclear weapons, each side used surrogate forces in distant theatres of war to achieve their objectives.
South Africa, so Mr P W Botha thought, was particularly important to the Soviets strategically, because of both its mineral wealth and its position astride the Cape sea route. As a result of this analysis, Mr Botha conceived the notion that South Africa was the subject of what he called a "total onslaught", and that a "total strategy" was required to counteract that threat. This involved co-ordinating the resources of the state and co- opting the private sector into what became known as the national security management system.
In pursuit of this, the Botha regime passed a raft of laws that concentrated power in the State Security Council, and which shut down the space for debate, dissent and the dissemination of information.
The National Key Points Act, Act 102 of 1980, was one of those laws. By supreme irony, another one was the Protection of Information Act of 1982. The National Key Points Act gave the Minister of Defence - who happened to be Mr P W Botha - wide powers to declare private and public installations as national key points, NKPs, in order to force owners to comply with security measures; to classify information about NKPs; and to criminalise unauthorised access to NKPs or the dissemination of information about them.
In introducing the measure to the apartheid Parliament, Mr Kobie Coetzee, who was the Deputy Minister of Defence, sounded chillingly like the Minister of Police today, when he said that, "the legislation had become necessary in the light of events such as those in Silverton, Booysens, Sasol, Secunda and Natref". These, I need to emphasise, were successful attacks carried out by MK operatives.
The essence of the National Key Points Act was, and remains, that it allows the Minister, in his or her sole discretion, to declare a site or an installation as a national key point, about which the public is not allowed to know anything, even whether the place concerned is in fact an NKP. It creates a range of penalties for a variety of offences, and, in keeping with apartheid-era legislation inspired by P W Botha's ideas of the total onslaught, it does not permit parliamentary or other oversight.
This legislation was conceived in the sin of apartheid and born in the darkest days of the total onslaught. It has no place on the Statute Book of a progressive constitutional democracy. [Applause.] And yet it stubbornly remains, unrepealed and used, amongst other things, to justify the veil of secrecy surrounding President Zuma's private residence at Nkandla.
The National Key Points Act must be repealed. The DA accepts that there are legitimate security concerns about critical infrastructure. Such infrastructure must be protected. However, this needs legislation that balances the need for security with proper oversight and scrutiny. The DA has drafted such legislation, which the hon Mazibuko referred to, and we commend it to this House.
The last thing that we would want in a government of South Africa which is 19 and a half years into democracy, is the accusation which, in French, says: plus a change, plus c'est la mme chose [the more things change, the more they stay the same]. [Applause.]