Speaker, Acting President Jeff Radebe, it is my great honour to close this debate today by saying that there rose in South African public life a few champions of liberty and justice with a consistency of conviction, integrity and purpose. Our first democratically elected President, Nelson Mandela, is one of them. Dr Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, whose life we honour today, is another. Van Zyl wrote:
I was 50 years old when I met Madiba face to face for the first time. I was completely disarmed by him and felt immediately that I would like to do anything to help him achieve his vision for South Africa.
Van Zyl kept his promise to the end. He was an Afrikaner who walked a different road. He treasured the assets of his background, but found Afrikaner nationalism to be suffocating. He recoiled also from African nationalism. He found the narrow rights-based approach to be inherently conservative. Van Zyl was my kind of man: a thinking liberal with strong social democratic leanings.
For those who knew Van Zyl, he had a warm directness in approach, a charming civility, an irrepressible republicanism and an impatience with status and ceremonial pretension. He was an instinctual democrat, someone who wore justice on his sleeve and clutched it to his heart.
He became one of the most celebrated debaters in Parliament, which he joined in 1974 as a Progressive Party member. He left under great controversy as Leader of the Opposition and later formed the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa, Idasa, in 1986. He said then that P W Botha's Tricameral Parliament was a dangerous exercise in futility, for it aggravated the divisions in our land.
In the history of Parliament, Van Zyl joined the ranks of a few excellent MPs who learned the art of debate, including in our history the brilliant liberal, Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, and the equally brilliant communist, Sam Kahn. Van Zyl's infinite appreciation for the beauty of words, his carefully timed witticisms, his unrelenting search for the truth, and the politically productive sarcasm that he used, invoked to great effect, became his art.
At Idasa, he was a visionary who saw the necessity of creating a climate for dialogue and negotiations - he did not start negotiations - starting with the meeting in Dakar in 1987 and followed by numerous other gatherings, bringing together individuals from across the divide. Writers he brought together; soldiers he brought together; women he brought together; and constitutionalists he brought together, as well as analysts. After he left, Idasa continued having meetings in order to build consensus for our constitutional process.
It was Van Zyl Slabbert who steered the financier George Soros to invest his considerable wealth in the creation of a more open society here and later expanded the enterprise to all of the countries of the Southern African Development Community, SADC. He inspired the creation of the Vrye Weekblad in the world of journalism and the Institute for Security Studies in the world of policy studies. He founded the Gore Institute in Senegal, building a continental network that animated the quest for peace and justice in Africa.
Van Zyl gave a great deal to public service: as chairman, as the ANC's Chief Whip noted, of the Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, crafting a future for that city; as one of the leaders for the local government elections of 1995 and 1996; and, as the hon Buthelezi pointed out, with his electoral task team on which I had the privilege to serve.
That task team recommended that half of the MPs in this House ought to be chosen by constituencies directly and the other half by proportional representation. Greater accountability and the proportionality required by our Constitution were the mantra. Van Zyl's team completed the design, as well as the demarcation, and the lawyers wrote the draft Bill in preparation for this.
I urge this House and the Minister of Home Affairs, the hon Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to appoint a task team to examine these proposals again. There is a great deal of interest among many members on both sides of this House in reforming our electoral process so as to empower voters.
About his role in life, I think of Van Zyl in the words of the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, when he wrote:
Human beings suffer They torture one another. They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured.
History says, don't hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.
In death, I think of our loss in the bleak melancholic poem of Eugne Marais, which must be read in Afrikaans:
O koud is die windjie en skraal. En blink in die dof-lig en kaal, so wyd as die Heer se genade, l die velde in sterlig en skade. En hoog in die rande, versprei in die brande, is die grassaad aan roere soos winkende hande.
O treurig die wysie op die ooswind se maat, soos die lied van 'n meisie in haar liefde verlaat. In elk grashalm se vou blink 'n druppel van dou, en vinnig verbleik dit tot ryp in die kou.
The DA wishes to express our deepest sympathy to his wife, Jane, his son, Riko, his daughter, Tania, and the many grandchildren who are part of the Slabbert family. I thank you. [Applause.]
Debate concluded.
Motion agreed to.