Cape Town, Tuesday
THE Queen will visit South Africa in March as part of the Prime
Minister's ''welcome home'' to the country after 30 years of bloodshed.
''In South Africa,'' he told the Parliament, ''the storm has gone. Hope,
good hope, has come back.''
He has a package of intensive backing for the coalition government
providing President Mandela continues to reassure that ANC Marxist
doctrines do not interfere.
He delivered his own updated version of Harold Macmillan's ''winds of
change'' warning 30 years ago in Cape Town. They must drop old-fashioned
ideas of nationalisation and embrace the modern concept of
privatisation.
He told the specially assembled Parliament, ''prudent management,
alertness to the challenges of the market,'' will deliver the results
that the people are impatient for.
Mr Major bluntly told the 400 MPs, black, white and coloured, that
they must go for ''policies which encourage free choice and discourage
bureaucratic meddling''. This was the approach, he said, to ''attract
hard-headed investors, to create jobs, prosperity and growth.''
Thirty years ago Harold Macmillan's ''winds of change'' speech was a
profound political message about the rise of black nationalism and how
it must be accommodated. Mr Major's message was strictly commercial and
designed to promise much from Britain provided South Africa avoided the
pitfalls of black rule in other African states.
Later Mr Major, in private talks with Mr Mandela's Deputy President,
Mr Thabo Mbeki, appeared to receive the reassurances that he and his
party of leading British businessmen required.
Mr Mbeki, who was accompanied at these talks by the new non-ANC
Finance Minister, Mr Chris Lietbenberg, promised that there would be no
new nationalisation. The coalition government had broad agreement, he
said, ''that the private sector should be dominant and that there is no
ideological barrier to privatisation''.
Following this, the Prime Minister met the other Deputy President, Mr
F W de Klerk, leader of the National Party which has relinquished power
and was told that the ANC's economic policy is proving very realistic
and sound.
This, said Mr de Klerk, ''will pass muster with international
organisations''. Furthermore Mr de Klerk told Mr Major that the new
constitution to provide true majority rule within five years would not
be too much different from the present one. There would be no overriding
power for the black majority.
The South African MPs were in a festive mood for the historic occasion
of the Prime Minister's address to the National Assembly. President
Mandela, Deputy President de Klerk, and Mr Major, wore matching yellow
carnations in their buttonholes.
All acknowledged the foresight of the last British Prime Minister to
visit here in 1960 whose ''wind of change'' warning so outraged the then
Afrikaaner government. But that, the Prime Minister said, was ''a
parliament in Africa, but not a parliament of Africa''.
Mr Major wants to make Britain and British goods and services number
one in one of the richest countries of the former empire. He praised
their two ''shining'' assets -- parliamentary democracy backed by
popular consent and the most modern and effective economy in all of
Africa.
He listed, to repeated applause, the increasing ways in which Britain
was to invest more than #100m over three years with social, scientific,
and training back-up. From this he expects a trading reward that will
create jobs in Britain.
The MPs liked what he said and so did the local press which
pronounced: ''Major Deal'' and in what may be his most flattering
headline ever: ''New Age Dawns -- John Major Arrives''.
The Prime Minister took his historic task solemnly. But then he
relaxed at a lunch given for him in the MPs' dining room. The faces on
the walls of the scions of apartheid -- Verwoerd, Vorster and their
Cabinet -- were as grave as they were when Macmillan stood on the same
spot and told them they must change.
Mr Major paid the portraits no heed. He told the selected dignitaries
that he had a sense that South Africa had come home again to the wider
world.
He had tried twice before to come to South Africa when he was working
for the Standard Chartered Bank. At the last moment his boss had pulled
him off the trips to go to International Monetary Fund meetings in the
Philippines and France instead. ''Imagine Manila and Paris instead of
Cape Town,'' he said.
Having got here at last -- only the second British Prime Minister to
do so -- he finds himself taking part in what he called one of the
remarkable events of the century, ''the stuff of history, of legend''.
He also found himself awed by the facilities of the British High
Commissioner in Cape Town, Sir Anthony Reeve, who, he said, lived in
''unimaginable luxury'' -- ''and we pay him too! But we might stop that
-- once a Treasury Minister always a Treasury Minister.'' It was only a
joke from the Treasury Minister who took us into the ERM, and out of it
#15bn poorer.
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