Chris Barron on Pik Botha
Nimble, sometimes ruthless chief envoy of a pariah nation
● Former foreign affairs minister Pik Botha, who has died at the age of 86, was responsible for the biggest letdown in SA’s history.
He supervised the writing of 1985’s infamous “Rubicon” speech in which state president PW Botha was to announce Nelson Mandela’s release, the unbanning of the ANC and the start of negotiations for a democratic SA.
In the belief that PW had signed off on it, he visited the world’s capitals excitedly briefing leaders to expect the unimaginable.
Thanks to Pik it was one of the most hyped speeches in history, and 200 million people settled in front of their TV screens and radios to hear PW announce the “dramatic changes” Pik had primed the world to expect.
Instead he shook his finger and warned the world: “Don’t push us too far.” With devastating consequences.
Any senior minister with a shred of principle might have been expected to submit his resignation. But Pik, proving not for the first or last time that his only principle was selfpreservation, swallowed hard and began drafting apologies to extremely angry world leaders who felt he’d led them up the garden path.
Black president
He didn’t have long to wait before more humble pie was served up in the form of a stinging rebuke from PW, in parliament, after Pik told the Cape Town Press Club that SA might have a black president some time in the future.
Pik was forced to retract and write a grovelling letter to PW admitting that having a black president was not government policy.
Again he swallowed.
Then came the visit to SA by the Eminent Persons Group (EPG) to broker negotiations between the government and the ANC and ward off sanctions, after Pik assured them that PW had approved.
The night before their final meeting, defence minister Magnus Malan, clearly with the blessing of PW, sent the South African Air Force to bomb ANC facilities in three frontline states, leaving the EPG initiative in tatters and Pik seething with impotent fury. Comprehensive sanctions were immediately imposed.
Again, rather than do the honourable thing, he swallowed hard.
In 1984 he pulled off the Nkomati Accord with Samora Machel’s Mozambique, which was hailed as a spectacular foreign affairs coup. In terms of the accord, SA would stop supporting the rebel group Renamo and Machel would expel the ANC. Again Pik was made to look entirely impotent when SA continued arming Renamo, and Machel kept the ANC.
When Machel’s plane crashed in the Lebombo mountains in SA in October 1986, killing him and 30-odd passengers, such was the breakdown of trust between Pik and the security establishment that he phoned Malan at 5.30am after hearing the news and demanded to know what he had done.
In the late 1980s he had to negotiate several booby traps that PW and his securocrats placed in his path to pull off the Angolan/Namibian peace agreement.
Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha was born on April 27 1932 in Rustenburg, Transvaal. His father was a school principal and Pik shone at the Hoër Volkskool Potchefstroom, where he matriculated.
He completed his BA LLB at the University of Pretoria and in 1953 joined the department of foreign affairs. After stints in Sweden and West Germany, during which he acquired the name “Pik” from the Afrikaans word pikkewyn because he looked like a penguin when he walked, he became a member of the South African legal team fighting at the International Court of Justice in The Hague to hold on to South West Africa, as Namibia was called.
He attended sessions of the UN General Assembly and became SA’s ambassador to the UN briefly, before the country was suspended.
In 1975 he was sent to Washington to replace his namesake, Frikkie Botha, as ambassador after Frikkie blew the whistle on the department of information’s “objectionable activities” in the capital.
In his book about the Info scandal, prime culprit Eschel Rhoodie said Pik was expected to be more “compliant” about their activities.
Frikkie was highly critical of Pik, saying that after replacing him in Washington Pik “did what Rhoodie and [minister Connie] Mulder wanted”, which was to look the other way.
Three years later the Info scandal rocked SA and brought down the government of BJ Vorster.
Pik was by turns bombastic, charming, manipulative, maudlin, melodramatic, self-righteous, bullying, philosophical and ruthless as his personal circumstances or those of the National Party demanded.
He hunted, drank heavily and groped women, including the daughter of his friend and assassinated Nat politician Dr Robert Smit, when she came to ask him who killed her father.
Acting skills
He was a spellbinding orator, which the Nats used to good effect in tight by-elections, but his speeches were for the most part full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
His thespian talents made him a great negotiator, as seen in the talks leading to Namibian independence, but often blurred the line between fantasy and reality as when he accused Swapo of pouring fighters into Namibia in contravention of the peace agreement.
All the world was a stage for him and everything he did was a performance. It was difficult to take him seriously or to know how seriously he took himself.
His acting skills were never demonstrated to more devastating effect than in 1978 when he launched an unprecedented personal attack in parliament on the leader of the opposition, Colin Eglin, whom he accused of betraying top state secrets to SA’s enemies on the basis of nothing more than a perfectly legitimate phone call Eglin had made to US ambassador to the UN, Don McHenry.
“If I were you I would crawl into a hole in the ground and stay there. I would never come out again,” he fulminated with one eye on the press gallery. It was pure theatre of the absurd. Eglin had no chance. He was visibly shattered and lost his job as leader of the opposition soon after.
It seemed a natural progression that after losing his job as foreign minister in 1994 Pik should form a close relationship with PieterDirk Uys’s alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout. Just as he’d developed the capacity to believe right up until the end that the Nats had “the answer” to SA’s problems, now Pik showed an extraordinary capacity to believe the rumour that he was having an affair with Evita. He certainly played along, sending her endless faxes and messages, as eagerly as he’d entertained his self-serving fantasies about apartheid being a necessary phase on the journey to democracy.
When president Nelson Mandela gave Pik minerals & energy in 1994 instead of keeping him on as foreign minister, as he had fondly imagined might happen, Pik started questioning the meaning of life and struck up a friendship with physicist Stephen Hawking. Can plants talk to each other, he wanted to know.
Botha is survived by his second wife, Ina, whom he married in 1998, and four children. His first wife, Helena, died in 1996.