South Africa The High Cost of Non-Nationhood

By William R. Doerner

The Prime Minister was out of the country for "medical reasons" that most of his countrymen believed were also largely political. Eight Cabinet ministers were reported to have resigned amid allegations of rampant corruption and to be held under house arrest. The acting Prime Minister ordered the army on alert, and roadblocks went up around the capital.

An unfolding coup d'etat? Well, possibly. But the turmoil that gripped the "republic" of Transkei last week was also the most recent setback suffered by South Africa in its 28-year attempt to ghettoize the country's black majority into a series of ten independent Bantustans, or homelands, legally separate from white South Africa. Conceived by the late Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd as an instrument of "grand" apartheid, his plan to engineer the total separation of the races, the homelands policy is now regarded even by the government as a practical impossibility because of South Africa's dependence on a black work force. But the legacy of the plan, in the form of four artificial black "states" set up by Pretoria between 1976 and 1981 and six homelands still considered part of the parent country, is taking a disconcerting and costly toll on white South Africa.

The nominally independent homelands -- Transkei, Venda, Bophuthatswana and Ciskei -- are collectively known in South Africa as the TVBC states. Their sovereignty is recognized by no one apart from South Africa and other homeland ; states. That limited diplomatic visibility, however, has not prevented some of them from succumbing to banana-republic political and financial excesses on a world-class scale -- including the imposition of one-party rule, nepotism, official corruption and wildly extravagant spending.

Transkei, the oldest of the independent homelands, is a case in point. Its first Prime Minister, Kaiser Matanzima, now 72, quickly established an authoritarian presence and installed his younger brother George as his successor when he became President in 1979. Together the Matanzimas managed to acquire large amounts of state land to add to their already substantial farming interests. More recently, however, the brothers had a falling out. The rift was exacerbated when Kaiser, now semiretired, feared that George, 68, was about to be unseated as a result of corruption charges. Two weeks ago, while George was recuperating from an unspecified illness in Port Elizabeth, Kaiser announced the formation of a new party in opposition to George's ruling National Independence Party.

The Matanzima dynasty has long been an embarrassment to South Africa, and not just because of its alleged corruption. When Pretoria rebuffed his claim to South African territory bordering on Transkei, Kaiser briefly committed the diplomatic farce of breaking off "relations" with the government that had granted Transkei its dubious independence. Last February Transkei-trained commandos were accused by authorities in Ciskei of attempting to assassinate their President, Lennox Sebe. The incident led to a virtual state of war between Pretoria's two pseudostate offspring.

Many South Africans would be amused by such posturing if it were not largely paid for with their taxes, which are by far the largest source of revenue for all the impoverished territories. The country spends nearly $1 billion a year on the four states, and a similar amount on the six nonindependent homelands. Taxpayers understandably grumble at displays of ostentation like the $60,000 bulletproof BMW sedan of Venda's President-for- Life Patrick Mphephu and his palatial residence, located not far from the mud- thatched huts of his poverty-ridden citizens. Editorialized the Johannesburg Sunday Star last week: "If the TVBC 'national states' and the six nonindependent homelands are a joke, they are a very costly joke."

The homeland experiments have not been complete failures. Economically, all four of the spun-off states are better off now than before their "independence," some dramatically so. Bophuthatswana, for example, has a booming mining sector that produces 30% of the world's platinum. All the homelands have profited from the blossoming of gambling casinos and nightclubs that offer Las Vegas-style topless entertainment, both of which are illegal in Calvinist South Africa. The best-known such playground, Bophuthatswana's Sun City, has attracted such headliners as Frank Sinatra and Elton John. Says Rodney Smith, chief director of development cooperation in the South African Department of Foreign Affairs: "Independence has been the spur to a substantial upswing in self-development. In fact, the TVBC countries work."

But Pretoria has evidently decided that they do not work well enough. Last month the government established a series of committees that will in effect control public spending in the TVBC states, thus further underlining the fiction of independence. Furthermore, South Africa's State President P.W. Botha has voiced reservations about the independence plans of KwaNdebele, a patchwork of black settlements northeast of Pretoria. Its chief minister, Majozi Mahlangu, claims a "mandate" for statehood based on a 1984 election in which only 1% of eligible voters participated. Mahlangu's move may prove too much even for Botha. But Pretoria's refusal to grant KwaNdebele its titular independence would not only prevent the creation of a fifth expensive nonentity, but also reveal the political bankruptcy of the other four.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg