Dikgang Moseneke describes drafting the interim constitution, including the land clause

activist; and George Devenish, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Natal.

We were expected to work full-time on the task and well beyond the call of duty. The technical committee’s relationship with the multi-party negotiation forum was one of agency. The committee worked for the collective of the parties in the plenary assembly.

Its primary task was to convert the political consensus of the negotiating chamber into a constitutional text. Every draft, usually in the form of a chapter or discrete clauses, was first circulated to all the parties and thereafter debated in an open plenary assembly.

The technical committee remained in attendance in the assembly during the debates on its drafts. We made amendments agreed to by the assembly. When the drafting committee could not agree on a text to place before the assembly, we produced more than one text reflecting the divergent drafts. The assembly would choose the one it preferred or ask the committee to revise its proposed drafts.

By and large, the drafts of the technical committee were highly regarded and altered only marginally. In some instances, the assembly would request a constitutional law opinion from the technical committee on a discrete issue. I worked closely with Arthur on the research.

The plenary assembly agreed on most provisions of the draft interim constitution. But there were hefty differences. The most raucous divergence was whether the envisaged republic would be a federal or unitary state.

Parties from the left were anxious to establish a competent unitary state capable of effective transformation.

The National Party, former homeland entities and others on the right pushed for a loose and decentralised federation in which the provinces held the bulk of the executive and legislative competencies, while national centre held limited and defined residual power. The compromise to this trenchant contest between federalism and unitarism was to split the difference by formulating complicated schedules of exclusive and concurrent national and provincial competencies. The schedules resurfaced in the final constitution.

Another sore point was the character of the final constitution after a majoritarian election.

Once the National Party and other likeminded parties had conceded a two-stage constitution-making process, their concern was to

Dikgang Moseneke retired as Deputy Chief Justice in May. My Own Liberator – A Memoir (Picador Africa) is available at bookstores nationwide or on orders@e-booksite.co.za