S Africa 'needs healthy opposition'

De Klerk: South Africa must move away from 'racially-based politics'

In the run-up to South Africa's elections, former President FW de Klerk has said he does not think democracy in the country is very healthy.

"What we need is opposition," Mr de Klerk told viewers of BBC News Online's Talking Point programme - though he said parties still had to work together "on the big challenges" of poverty, crime and Aids.

Mr de Klerk said a country in which "one party has more or less two-thirds of the vote, with five or six parties fighting for the rest of the slice of cake... is not a healthy democracy ".

Mr de Klerk headed South Africa's National Party - the party which instituted the country's notorious racist policy of apartheid - from 1989 to 1994.

The biggest victims of crime are the people living in the squatter towns, where a life is worth nothing FW de Klerk Interview in full

However, he also oversaw the release of Nelson Mandela from jail and the two men were later jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for steering the country to democracy.

The party of resistance to apartheid, the African National Congress, still dominates the spectrum of political life in South Africa.

Crime

During the programme, Mr de Klerk said South Africa faced the challenge of moving away from "racially based politics to value based politics".

He said the country still needed to address "bad social conditions" - high unemployment, low quality of life - as well as improve its judicial system, if it wanted to tackle the roots of the country's high crime rate.

A lot done, but a lot to do in the next decade, said de Klerk

But, questioned by one viewer on the issue of crime, he insisted tourists would find South Africa was no more dangerous than any major city or tourist destination in the world - "if you listen to good advice... and stay out of certain areas".

And he said the biggest victims of crime were those who lived in the country's squatter towns (shanty towns), "where life is worth nothing, where people are living in totally unacceptable conditions".

Poverty, he asserted, was the country's biggest single challenge.

Mr de Klerk said the country still possessed the foundation to become Africa's first developed nation - though he conceded it might take "slightly longer" than a decade.

'No Zimbabwe'

Mr de Klerk forcefully rejected a suggestion from one viewer that South Africa risked going the way of its crisis-ridden neighbour Zimbabwe.

He said South Africa's majority black people now had too high a stake in its economic and political fortunes, and was constitutionally protected from such a fate.

"I don't believe we will go the way of Zimbabwe whatsoever. We will not allow radicals from left or right to undo the wonderful things we have achieved," he said.