Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404110129
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT SHEPARD COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
For the last 12 months, media consultant Frank Greer and pollster Stanley Greenberg have been advising Mandela and the ANC in preparation for this month's historic voting, the first all-race election in South Africa.
``It was an opportunity to build a model democracy and economic powerhouse,'' Greer said recently. ``Symbolically, it is important for all of Africa.''
Greer and Greenberg have been traveling back and forth between Washington and South Africa under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-governmental organization established in 1983 to promote democratic institutions in other countries.
It does so through such programs as voter education and training election monitors. In recent years, the endowment has helped eastern European nations, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Chile make the transition to democracy. The endowment's program has been under way in South Africa for months.
Although the organization is funded by Congress - this year's appropriation is $35 million - it claims to be nonpartisan and does not represent the U.S. government or any administration.
Its assistance to Mandela is viewed as nonpartisan because the once-banned ANC, unlike President F.W. de Klerk's National Party that has governed the country since 1948, is categorized as a ``previously disadvantaged'' political organization.
Greer and Greenberg were hand picked by Mandela in early 1993, shortly after Clinton's inauguration, to help turn the ANC into a grass-roots political organization - a daunting task given the ANC's history of armed opposition to the ruling white regime in South Africa.
Beginning in April 1993, the two Clinton campaign advisers started traveling to South Africa, conducting training sessions with ANC officials, helping them with everything from organizational structure and strategy to polling, developing campaign themes and handling the media.
``It wasn't easy,'' said Greenberg.
Although the endowment's ANC assistance program is not secret, Greenberg and Greer have been reluctant to strike too high a profile in South Africa, apparently out of concern about their personal security amid the widespread violence there in the runup to the April 26-28 voting.
Even polling, normally a relatively simple and routine process in U.S. elections, was a challenge, Greer said. Many South Africans lack telephones and, because of the country's history of secret police, are suspicious of door-to-door public opinion canvassers.
In addition, approximately 7 million of the country's 40 million citizens are illiterate.
Despite these obstacles, the ANC was ready by last September to hold a series of ``people's forums'' featuring Mandela.
The forums were designed to overcome what Greenberg's polling had detected - that even black South Africans had come to view the ANC as a big, powerful, detached organization that did not relate to their everyday lives.
But also from those forums came the Mandela campaign theme of ``A Better Life For All,'' developed with the assistance of local advertising and polling firms.
Greer said the ANC instinctively wanted to make the election a referendum on apartheid. But, as they did with the Clinton campaign in 1992 with its Fleetwood Mac message of ``don't stop thinking about tomorrow,'' the two U.S. political strategists gave the ANC a forward-looking message.
``The fact that apartheid has ended is very important,'' Greer said. ``But this election is about the future and not the past.''
Working with ANC aides, the Clinton political operatives devised a three-tiered advertising strategy for the election, incorporating television, radio and printed advertisements.
In January, the Mandela campaign launched an advertising campaign featuring what Greer described as ``everyday people'' talking about ``working together for jobs, peace and freedom'' under an ANC government.
``Contrast campaign'' ads followed, contrasting the ANC's promises of better housing, education and jobs with the gaping inequities between the lives of black and white South Africaners under apartheid.
In recent weeks, the Mandela campaign has entered its ``reassurance stage,'' in which the ANC has sought to reassure white South Africans that an ANC government will respect their rights.
It also is intended to reassure the international business community and, in particular, the United States, which is already committed to providing economic assistance and expertise to the new government.
The social and economic problems of South Africa are hardly likely to be resolved as a result of one election, its historic significance notwithstanding. The recent political violence there attests to that.
But just four years ago, Mandela was in prison, having spent 27 years behind bars for leading a sabotage campaign against South Africa's white regime.
And only last November, after four decades of domestic unrest and international condemnation, did South Africa adopt an interim post-apartheid constitution, a first step toward becoming a nonracial democracy and making the upcoming national election possible.
The 75-year-old Mandela and his party are expected to win a sizable majority in the parliamentary and provincial balloting. Blacks comprise nearly 76 percent of South Africa's population of nearly 40 million, and it is unlikely that many will support de Klerk.
But the ANC wants to win big, at least two-thirds of the country's 490-seat Parliament, in order to write and ratify a new permanent constitution all by itself.
by CNB