Connie Quits

Never before had a Cabinet officer from South Africa's ruling National Party been forced to resign in disgrace. Last week the spreading scandal over misuse of a secret multimillion-dollar slush fund within the now disbanded Department of Information claimed its first major victim: Cornelius P. ("Connie") Mulder, 53, powerful Minister of Plural Relations and Nationalist boss of South Africa's huge Transvaal province. Bowing to pressure from his party colleagues, Mulder reluctantly resigned from his euphemistically named Cabinet post, where he administered the apartheid laws that govern the lives of South Africa's 18.5 million blacks. Said Mulder: "I have no remorse in my soul about the entire matter, because everything I have done I did in the conviction that I was serving my country, South Africa, in the best way."

While Afrikaners adjusted to the shock of Mulder's resignation, Prime Minister P.W. Botha struggled desperately to prevent the scandal from spreading. Botha publicly dismissed Supreme Court Justice Anton Mostert. The jurist had conducted a one-man probe of the operation of the slush fund during the time that Mulder served as Minister of the Interior and Information under former Prime Minister John Vorster. Mostert's report produced testimony from witnesses that the Information Department had illegally financed the start of a pro-government Johannesburg daily, the Citizen, and allegations of personal abuse of the fund amounting to millions of dollars. To angry opposition members of Parliament, the judge's ouster amounted to an attempted cover-up of Pretoria's "Watergate." In protest, they refused to accept appointments to a special bipartisan investigative body. Indeed, there is intense pressure on Botha within his own party not to suppress such evidence.

At week's end Botha named Interior Minister Alwyn Schlebusch, 61, as Mulder's interim replacement. Amid continuing rumors that other Cabinet ministers might be caught up in the scandal, there was growing speculation that the unsolved murders of a Nationalist candidate and his wife during last year's election campaign were also involved. Robert Smit and his wife Jeanne-Cora were discovered in their home near Johannesburg, fatally wounded by guns and knives. Bloody slogans had been scrawled across the walls of the house, apparently to disguise the killings as the work of terrorists or a religious cult. The Pretoria rumor mill now has it that Smit, a financier by profession, had uncovered evidence of irregularities in foreign exchange transactions, and was murdered in order to keep him quiet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.