Every few months, President F.W. de Klerk gathers his Cabinet colleagues together and heads for the bushveld. In a camp in the Transvaal province near the Botswana border, they thrash out political strategy, yet find time to sit around a fire and eat wild game. The idea is to work, but also to relax under the wide African sky.
Last week that sky seemed to be falling in on De Klerk, who returned from his latest two-day retreat to face a credibility crisis that is growing with bush-fire speed. Exposes in the Johannesburg Weekly Mail showed that the ( government, despite repeated denials and stonewalling, had provided covert funds via the South African police to underwrite Inkatha, a group battling the African National Congress for the support of the country's nearly 29 million blacks. By Pretoria's admission, Inkatha and an allied labor union received at least $600,000.
The scandal widened days later, when Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha admitted that contrary to previous denials, South Africa had secretly spent more than $36 million to keep the leftist South West Africa People's Organization from winning a commanding victory in pre-independence elections in neighboring Namibia in 1989. Pretoria's support of at least seven parties opposed to SWAPO may have prevented the organization from gaining the two- thirds majority it needed to introduce a socialist constitution.
The disclosures of secrecy and subterfuge undermined De Klerk's credibility at a critical moment. After destroying the pillars of apartheid and persuading the U.S. and other countries to drop their sanctions against South Africa, De Klerk must try to get the A.N.C. and other black groups to the negotiating table to write a new constitution that would extend voting rights to the black majority. "Inkathagate," as the press dubbed the affair, may delay the start of an all-party conference, originally planned as early as September, where the major political groups will decide how to structure negotiations. Use of secret funds by Pretoria also raised suspicions that it was employing below- the-belt tactics to weaken the A.N.C., widely considered the most likely group to win the country's first free elections.
As disturbing, the scandal lent credence to charges that security forces have aided armed attacks by Inkatha supporters on A.N.C. members. Since 1986 more than 6,000 people have been killed in black-vs.-black clashes, giving comfort to those who argue that inherent tribalism renders blacks unfit to be stewards of democracy. A.N.C. president Nelson Mandela has warned that power- sharing talks could founder unless the government can ensure the impartiality of the security forces, a notion Inkathagate now puts in serious doubt.