Former British ambassador to South Africa Lord Robin Renwick, who was recently in Cape Town to launch his book How to Steal a Country, says South Africa would have been a goner if former president Jacob Zuma's camp had carried the day at the ANC's elective conference in December.
Renwick began writing the book when state capture was still rampant and the future looked worse than at any time since apartheid.
"The international investment community was very worried that South Africa was in danger of going over the edge of a cliff.
"If the Zuma camp had won in December, you would have gone over that cliff," he says.
The last time South Africa was staring into the abyss was in 1987. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher sent Renwick to deal with her cantankerous counterpart, PW Botha, and avert what seemed inevitable catastrophe."Everybody was forecasting a civil war," says Renwick. "No one was forecasting a happy outcome."
South Africa was being run by what Renwick calls "some of the worst people in the world".
Botha had established "a South American-style military junta" characterised by state-sponsored death squads and "security-force generals with no principles whatsoever".
Britain's diplomatic efforts had bounced off Botha like peas off an armadillo. Thatcher told Renwick that the time for diplomatic niceties was over. He recalls her saying: "I'm sending you to South Africa because you're not a diplomat."
With his subtle, charming manner and enigmatic smile, Renwick seems the very model of a British envoy, but "I'm not always very diplomatic", he says.
Nor, to put it mildly, was Botha. "We very actively disliked each other," says Renwick. "The meetings I had with PW Botha were the frostiest I've ever had in my life."
Presumably fooled by his urbane exterior, Botha tried to bully Renwick. "When I saw him in his study he'd be sitting in the dark at his desk with just a green lamp on. He was trying to be intimidating."
Renwick says it never worked.
"The advantage of being Thatcher's envoy was that I didn't have to be scared of anyone."
When Botha banned the United Democratic Front, Renwick said in a widely publicised speech aimed directly at Botha: "If you want to get out of a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging."
He thinks his status saved him from expulsion. "That would have got me thrown out of any other African country, but Botha couldn't throw out Thatcher's representative."
DEATH ROW
When Renwick arrived in South Africa, the Sharpeville Six had been sentenced to death for the murder of the deputy mayor of Sharpeville in 1984.
There was mounting international pressure for their release, which Botha had ignored. They were on death row and the date of execution was looming. Botha had made it clear he would not intervene.
Renwick went to see Botha and told him: "If you execute these people, we will impose additional sanctions."
That might come as a laugh to those who believe that Thatcher's refusal to support sanctions prolonged apartheid, but Renwick says she has been unjustly maligned.
"She refused to impose blanket sanctions, which in her opinion and mine were absolutely useless, a waste of time. Thatcher imposed military sanctions and sports sanctions, both of which really hurt South Africa."
He believes Botha took the threat seriously and this helped to save the Sharpeville Six. On July 11 1988, 15 hours before their scheduled hangings, they were granted an indefinite stay of execution.
"The threat helped," says Renwick.
Renwick had brokered difficult political deals before coming to South Africa. In 1979 he facilitated the Lancaster House agreement that led to Zimbabwe's independence.After spending three months locked in the same building with Robert Mugabe, he had few illusions about him, he says.
"He kept saying to me: 'Power comes from the barrel of a gun, and I have a PhD in terrorism.' If there'd been a response from the international community to his slaughter of 20,000 Ndebele people in the early '80s it would have changed the course of Zimbabwe. But there wasn't, so he got away with it."
Trying to persuade Botha to release Nelson Mandela was like trying to shift an iceberg.
Renwick was convinced that Mandela was key to any peaceful resolution of the South African crisis and that his death in jail would be an unmitigated disaster. This was beginning to look more and more likely, and the prospect terrified him.
"I told PW Botha: 'You are playing with fire. You're one heart attack away from an insurrection in this country. If Mandela dies in jail there will be violence on a scale you have never seen before.'"
Botha said he would crush it. Renwick warned him: "You can try to crush it with tanks or whatever, but South Africa will never be the same again."
Renwick reported to Thatcher that Botha had no intention of releasing Mandela until he was at death's door: "Because he knew that if he released Mandela he would lose control of the situation. FW de Klerk knew that too. That the situation would escape the government's control. He released him anyway. Botha had no intention of releasing him."
Then, of course, Botha had a stroke. "A bit of divine intervention, perhaps," says Renwick, smiling. "But you still needed somebody with the sheer guts to do what De Klerk did."
He said this to Mandela when he complained about FW: "Remember, it's a lot easier to negotiate yourself into power than to negotiate yourself out of power, which is what De Klerk is doing."CIVIL WAR
Renwick and Mandela developed a strong bond after 1990. If you want to get a rise out of him, just ask if he shared Thatcher's view that Mandela was a terrorist.
"Thatcher never said he was a terrorist, OK? That is one of the great myths propagated by her political opponents."
But didn't she call the ANC a terrorist organisation?
"She regarded ANC attacks on civilians in South Africa as terrorist attacks, and so did I," says Renwick.
He claims that when the Iron Lady met Mandela, "she fell a bit in love with him".
Renwick helped Mandela prepare for this meeting: with the ambassador playing Thatcher, Mandela launched into an interminable account of his struggle for democracy, and would not be chivvied.
When Renwick briefed his famously impatient principal before the meeting, he told her delicately: "Please remember he's waited 27 years to tell you his story."
Thatcher gave him a piercing look and said: "You mean I mustn't interrupt."
In 1991, Renwick became the UK's ambassador to Washington, which he was not entirely happy about.
"Obviously, I didn't want to leave South Africa because I'd become very involved ... more involved, arguably, than ambassadors should be."
He had "very good relationships" with De Klerk, Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi, with whom he has kept in touch.
He does not share the view that Buthelezi's hands are uniquely bloodstained from that period."The hands of both sides were covered in blood. The ANC had its warlords in KwaZulu-Natal led by Harry Gwala. One of my regrets was that I helped to get him out of prison."
He makes the point that nobody did more to end the bloody civil war than Zuma.
"He played an honourable role in ending the violence, so it is a Shakespearean tragedy, what has happened to him."
Renwick says in spite of Mandela's periodic threats to end talks, he never doubted they would succeed.
"There was a huge amount of brinkmanship. After Mandela broke off negotiations I said to him: 'The only alternative to negotiations now is negotiations later.' He said: 'Yes, of course, but I have to deal with my constituency.'
"Everybody portrays him as a saintly figure, and of course he was a saintly figure. But he was also unbelievably crafty. Very wily. He would consistently make hardline speeches to his constituency, the youth, and tell me the same day that the negotiations were going to move ahead and I shouldn't worry."
Renwick believes that "one of the points at which things went seriously wrong" in South Africa was when the UDF was "elbowed aside" by returning ANC exiles.
"The UDF did more to liberate this country than the exiles did," he says. "But they were pushed aside, including Cyril Ramaphosa, who probably should have done more to oppose what happened.
"The exiles were more conspiratorial, more paranoid and more prone to corruption than 90% of the UDF were."
He believes Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada were closer in spirit to the UDF than to the ANC "apparatchiks" whose intentions for South Africa were evident in the incendiary speeches they wrote for Mandela.Before the 1994 election, Mandela asked Renwick, who by then was based in Washington, to arrange meetings with investors in the US.
"He came to Washington with, as usual, an absolutely dreadful speech written for him by ANC apparatchiks," recalls Renwick.
"I said: 'For God's sake don't say that, just say what you want to say.' It went very well but it wasn't at all what he was programmed to say."
DANCING WITH THE QUEEN
After retiring from the diplomatic service Renwick, now 80, spent 20 years as deputy chairman of Flemings merchant bank and as vice-chairman of JP Morgan. Most of his job was to attract investment into emerging markets, especially South Africa.
He says even under the enlightened leadership of Ramaphosa, who he has known for 30 years, South Africa will need massive and rapid foreign investment to save it from ruin.
Ramaphosa has appointed a team of "investment envoys" to bring in $100-billion (R1.3-billion) over the next five years, but Renwick says this won't happen unless he makes "some policy choices".
If he were still a serving ambassador in South Africa, Renwick says, he would give Ramaphosa this advice: "Mr President, we go back a long way. If you want to get overseas investment back into the mining sector, you cannot have uncertainty about re-empowerment."
As for land expropriation without compensation, Renwick says: "It's no use pretending that is not a negative for investment here. It really is. Because investors are thinking, 'Oh my god, is this the road to Zimbabwe?' You and I know that it is not. But overseas fund managers don't."He feels the biggest threat to South Africa is youth unemployment.
"The Ramaphosa government will not succeed unless there is a serious attack on youth unemployment", which would also serve to "keep Julius Malema at bay, because what makes him so dangerous is that there is a constituency out there which has nothing to lose", he says.
Renwick's fondest memory is of persuading Mandela to get up and dance in the royal box during a performance by Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
"Mandela protested that he could not get up because he was sitting next to the Queen. I said: 'Stand up and dance'. So he did. The Duke of Edinburgh thought he'd better join in so he stood up too, and then the Queen stood up and started dancing. This wasn't a feat that could have been achieved by any other world leader, believe me."
Nor, probably, by any other ambassador.PEER OF THE REALM
Renwick has an MA in history from Cambridge University and studied further at the Sorbonne in France. He joined the British Foreign Service in 1963 and held various posts in Europe, Africa, India and the US before being appointed British ambassador to South Africa in 1987. He was transferred to Washington as Britain's ambassador to the US from 1991 until his retirement from the diplomatic service in 1995.
Renwick was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1980, promoted to Knight Commander (KCMG) in 1989 and made a life peer (with the title Baron Renwick of Clifton) in 1997. He is a member of the House of Lords, where he is referred to as the Right Honourable Lord Renwick of Clifton...