SOUTH AFRICA'S 490 parliamentarians last night agreed a final constitution drafted painstakingly over the past two years by the required two thirds majority.
The 400 members of the House of Assembly and the 90 members of the Senate meet today in a joint sitting to vote on the constitution after 11th hour negotiations between President Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and vice president F.W. de Klerk's National Party (NP). Between them the two groups control over 80 per cent of the votes.
The Justice Minister, Mr Dullah Omar, told the constitutional committee late last night that agreement had been reached on the property clause, the only outstanding issue after other negotiators reported success on contended employer lock out and education clauses.
"We are very happy to note that agreement has been reached with regard to this clause," he said, publicly clearing the last hurdle to a deal.
President Mandela had been optimistic earlier yesterday that agreement would be reached on the three outstanding issues. But he warned if opposition parties thwarted the ANC whose parliamentarians are just 15 votes short of the two thirds threshold it would press ahead for the eventual adoption of its own preferred constitution.
The other most important and intractable of the disputes which had been holding up the constitution was the single medium school question that is, whether or not education is to be given only in English.
The National Party wanted single medium schools to be entrenched as a right in the constitution. Otherwise, it said. Afrikaans language schools would be forced to become dual medium schools, providing instruction in Afrikaans and English. Thus the long term survival of Afrikaans would be threatened by numerical dominance of speakers, white and black.
The ANC, however, felt that the trench Afrikaans medium, schools would allow the NP toe preserve these largely underused schools as enclaves of privileged inherited from the apartheid era.
An ANC compromise formula reportedly altered recognition to Afrikaans medium schools, but bulked at offering to entrench single medium schools as an in alienable right.
Yesterday's mood of optimism was marred by one distinctly negative element the decision of.
Chief Mangusotho Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party to boycott today's meeting in protest against what it sees as the failure of the ANC to honour an undertaking to submit outstanding constitutional differences to international mediation.
However, the president put a positive face on the situation earlier yesterday.
"I am confident we will be able to pass a constitution which has been agreed to by all parties," Mr Mandela said. "If not, that will be regrettable because the ANC will (then) write its own constitution.
Mr Mandela's optimism was shared by Mr Leon Wessels, a NP frontbencher and the deputy chairman of the Constitutional Assembly.
Emerging from a NP caucus meeting yesterday, he raised both hands in a victory salute, saying.
"We are going to make it."
IFP anger was not mollified by the decision, announced on Monday, to postpone a scheduled local government election on May 29th in the province of KwaZuluNatal, where the IFP is the majority party.