Willie Spies@Willie_Spies
Cyril, Roelf, and the National Monologue
President Cyril Ramaphosa has just announced the names of his “team of thirty” prominent South Africans tasked with setting the agenda for his long-promised “national dialogue.” The group includes only one Afrikaner: Roelf Meyer.
Roelf Meyer and Cyril Ramaphosa share a long history in South Africa. In the early 1990s, left-leaning South African media often swooned with admiration for the then-young National Party minister who completed his national service in the Defense Force’s Church Choir and Concert Group (the Canaries) and eventually became Minister of Defense. This followed the so-called “night of the generals,” when former President FW de Klerk overnight sacked all the generals in the Defense Force and security services he perceived as threats in a feared coup.
Meyer thus replaced the respected former Defense Force chief, General Magnus Malan, as Minister of Defense. He later took on the role of Minister of Constitutional Development, a position previously held by heavyweights like Dr. Gerrit Viljoen, former rector of RAU and political scientist, and Mr. Chris Heunis.
At the time, Cyril Ramaphosa was the chief negotiator for the ANC/Cosatu/SACP alliance in the process of negotiating a transitional constitution in 1993 and, ultimately, the final constitution in 1996. With his extensive experience as a negotiator in the trade union movement, he was an exceptionally skilled and astute negotiator. Wage negotiations between unions and the Chamber of Mines were no child’s play. Negotiators on both sides had to master the chess game of bargaining, representing interests, and making wise compromises to succeed, all while knowing they were accountable to their respective bases—union members on one side and shareholders on the other.
Roelf Meyer, by contrast, lacked anything close to Ramaphosa’s experience. When he is held up as an exemplar of a leader who guided his country to a peaceful transition through negotiations and is invited to international conflicts to advise leaders on peacemaking, I often wonder what advice he actually offers.
He did some peculiar things. First, it didn’t take him long to abandon the National Party, on whose behalf he had negotiated a transition that would forever change his country’s future just five years earlier. After a brief experiment with General Bantu Holomisa’s UDM, he joined the ANC.
Imagine, for a moment, the chief Israeli negotiator for peace with Hamas in the Palestinian territories concluding a peace agreement with Hamas. Broadly, the agreement stipulates that Israel and Palestine—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—become one country with a simple majority government, in which Palestinians, with their larger numbers and exponential population growth, would form the majority government. Leftists worldwide would celebrate, but it would mean the end of Israel. Now add a twist to the story: within five years, the Israeli chief negotiator joins Hamas and becomes a devoted follower of its ideology. By all standards, this is unthinkable. Yet, in South Africa, Roelf Meyer demonstrated that this is exactly what he did.
A second oddity regarding Meyer’s role during the transition process comes from claims in the book Binnekring by prominent Cape Town senior advocate Dr. Jan Heunis. During the constitutional negotiations, Heunis was a senior state legal advisor in the Department of Constitutional Development. In his role as a state official, he accompanied Minister Roelf Meyer to National Party caucus meetings, the national assembly, and discussions with ANC representatives, particularly Mr. Cyril Ramaphosa. In his book, Heunis describes personally observing how Meyer often received clear mandates from the National Party caucus to negotiate specific issues regarding group and minority rights. Yet, during talks with the ANC, Meyer would simply not raise these issues, excusing it by saying the ANC would never agree to them anyway.
After the adoption of the final constitution, Cyril Ramaphosa remarked that he watched National Party parliamentarians celebrating the final constitution in parliament and wondered why they were so excited. He also noted that the ANC was prepared to make greater concessions to the National Party, but the National Party representatives never asked for them.
With this history in mind, the question arises: what will this “national dialogue” really be about? Judging by President Ramaphosa’s advisors tasked with setting the agenda, it looks more like a national monologue of like-minded individuals.
As such, the intended “national dialogue” risks degenerating into a “national silencing” of critical voices.
Column written for Nuusweek by Willie Spies on June 13, 2025
