Connie Mulder

Peter Cornelius Mulder ( born June 5, 1925 in Warmbaths, Transvaal; † January 12, 1988 in Johannesburg), also known as Connie Mulder, was a South African politician during the apartheid era. He served from 1958 to 1978 as a Member of Parliament of the National Party, and from 1968 as Minister of Information. He was also a later addition to the Information Ministry as Minister of Plural Relations and Development responsible for implementing the policy of apartheid under the native population. However, his involvement in an become known as Mulder Gate Affair political scandal led to his expulsion from the National Party and his withdrawal from office. About seven months before his death he won for positioned politically to the right of the National Party Conservative Party, which had been founded in the early 1980s, again a seat in parliament.

Life

Connie Mulder was born in 1925 in the province of Transvaal, and taught according to a study, graduating in 1945 with a BA degree and a teaching certificate, first story, Afrikaans and German in Randfontein. At the University of the Witwatersrand, he later earned a Ph.D. with a thesis on the influence of the Bible on the national character of the Boers. Then he started in the National Party a political career, and was first deputy mayor, and later Mayor of Randfontein. In 1958 he was elected to the district Randfontein in the South African Parliament. Ten years later he was appointed minister of information, in the following years he also took on the department " native administration", which was renamed to his initiative " Ministry of plural relations and development ."

Connie Mulder was seen as a possible successor to the incumbent since 1966, Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster. From 1977 onwards, however, there was triggered by publications of the newspaper Rand Daily Mail, to uncover its role in a bekanntgewordenem as Mulder Gate Affair political scandal that ended his career in the National Party. Background of the affair were initiated by Mulder and his Secretary of State Eshel Rhoodie attempts by the South African government to use funds from 1973 the Ministry of Defence in order to manipulate public opinion on apartheid at home and abroad through covert propaganda activities. Mulder had subsequently after allegations that he had to Parliament telling the truth, leave the responsibility for the information to Foreign Minister Pik Botha. In addition, he was defeated in the elections for the leadership of the National Party his intra-party rivals Pieter Willem Botha, who in 1978 took over the office of Prime Minister Vorster. After a commission appointed by Botha in 1979 came to the conclusion that there had been in the Ministry of Information under Mulder's guide to serious financial irregularities, he retired to his previously effected exclusion from the National Party from political office. The Steyn Commission worked from 1979 proposals for a future to be controlled by the government media landscape in South Africa.

He subsequently founded in June 1979, the " Action Front for National Priorities " ( Action Front for National Priorities ) with the aim of forming a new party, whose main concern was the territorial separation and self-determination of the individual ethnic groups. The resulting National Conservative Party, was elected its chairman Mulder in November 1979, made ​​two years later a result of two percent in the parliamentary elections. In the following years she united with other right-wing parties to the Conservative Party that rose in the 1980s as the leading opposition party in South Africa. Connie Mulder won the elections in May 1987 for the Conservative Party again a seat in Parliament, but he died in early 1988 due to illness at the age of 62 years in Johannesburg.

Family

Connie Mulder was married and the father of three sons and one daughter. His son Pieter Mulder since 2001, Chairman of the Freedom Front, founded in 1994, which positions itself as a party to represent the interests of the Boers, and since 2009 Vice- Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in the government of President Jacob Zuma. His son Corné Mulder is politically active, and was appointed in 1994 as MP for the Freedom Front to the South African Parliament to. As early as 1988 he had been elected in the by-election in the District of Randfontein, which was necessitated by the death of his father, for the Conservative party in parliament.