Kader Asmal dies

ANC veteran Kader Asmal has died, the party said on Wednesday.

Luthuli House had received confirmation from the ANC's Western Cape office, secretary general Gwede Mantashe said.

He died in Constantia hospital in Cape Town after having a heart attack and slipping into a coma, e news reported.

Asmal was the minister of water affairs and forestry from 1994, a member of the ANC's national executive committee, and education minister from 1999.

Friend Trevor Manuel noted that he turned the formerly unremarkable water affairs ministry into the cabinet's “sexiest portfolio”.

Asmal left parliament in 2008 to take up a post at the University of the Western Cape where he was professor extraordinary in the faculty of law.

This also appeared to mark a move towards greater independence from the ruling party, with Asmal not hesitating to criticise when he believed government was wrong.

The most recent example of this was his vocal criticism of the Protection of Information Bill now before parliament.

Last week he urged South Africans to reject the bill and warned the ANC that rushing it through parliament would destroy trust in the democratic process.

Asmal said he had hoped the weight of public opposition to the so-called "secrecy bill" would by now have persuaded the relevant ministers and MPs "to take this appalling measure back to the drawing board".

"Since this has not happened, my conscience will not let my silence be misunderstood. I ask all South Africans to join me in rejecting this measure in its entirety," he said in a letter sent to the Right 2 Know Campaign, a coalition heading opposition to the legislation.

A dapper and combative man, he was equally forthright in his condemnation of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe at a time when his colleagues in the ANC and particularly those in government chose to keep quiet about the atrocities perpetrated in that country.

At the launch in 2007 of a book by Judith Todd, daughter of former Southern Rhodesia prime minister Garfield Todd, who opposed white minority rule under Ian Smith, he lamented that he had not spoken out earlier.

Delivering the 2008 Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture at the University of Johannesburg, he urged South African universities to inculcate in students a culture of promoting ethics and morality in public life, saying: “We need to speak out, act and ensure that our own words and deeds contribute to the rejuvenation of the values of ethics and morality that propelled many of us to wage the struggle for our country's liberation.”

Asmal was just as vocal in his opposition to the disbanding of the Scorpions.

ANCYL leader Julius Malema, "tenderpreneurs", and the National Youth Development Agency have also recently been the target of his criticism, with the NYDA being described as worse than a farce.

In 2009, he described then deputy police minister Fikile Mbalula's idea of militarising the police service as "craziness" and smacking of "low-level political decision-making".

"The new administration is referring to the militarisation of the police," Asmal told the Cape Town Press Club.

"I have this former head of the youth league (Mbalula) who aspires to be secretary general of the ANC. Ha, really, I hope I won't be alive.

"He said we must militarise the police. We spent days and days in 1991 to get away from the idea of a militarised police force. Extraordinary. "This is a kind of craziness all of us have to take into account. It is part of that low-level political decision-making without reference to the Cabinet," he said.

In earlier days, besides his role in the anti-apartheid struggle and pro-human rights endeavours, Asmal will be remembered for his efforts to supply clean water to the poor and the rural people of South Africa during his tenure as water affairs minister from 1994.

As education minister from 1999 he vigorously continued and extended the reforms of his predecessor, Sibusiso Bengu, while taking stock of what had been done.

Abdul Kadera Asmal was born on October 8, 1934, to a middle-class family of Stanger (now Kwa-Dukuza) in KwaZulu-Natal.

Asmal later recalled that the decisive moment in his political growth was when he saw footage of Nazi concentration camp victims.

That prompted his decision to become a lawyer, so he could oppose the Nazi mentality, which he likened to apartheid.

In his matric year he saw the Defiance Campaign's leaders marching in prison uniforms through his town's streets. His response was to lead a stay-away from his school.

Asmal met ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Chief Albert Luthuli while still at school.

After starting his studies for his teacher's diploma in Durban in 1953, he strengthened his ties with Luthuli, his mentor, who had been banned and restricted to Groutville, near Stanger.

While teaching, Asmal obtained a BA degree through the University of South Africa.

In 1959 he went abroad to study law. He graduated from the London School of Economics four years later.

Because of his political activities he was not allowed to return to South Africa. Instead he accepted a teaching post at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

He spent the next 27 years lecturing there, specialising in human rights, labour and international law.

In 1980 he was appointed dean of the arts faculty.

Asmal was a member of both the London and Dublin bars and obtained two master's degrees during this time.

He was a founder member of both the British and Irish Anti-Apartheid Movements, and chaired the latter for nearly three decades.

He also served as vice-president of the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa from 1968 to 1982, and as president of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties between 1976 and 1990.

He was involved with civil rights campaigns elsewhere in the world, including Northern Ireland and Palestine. Asmal participated in a number of international inquiries into human rights violations.

In 1983 he was awarded the Prix Unesco of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in recognition for his work in the advancement of human rights.

Having served on the ANC's constitutional committee since its establishment in 1986, he returned to South Africa in 1990 and was appointed professor of human rights at the University of the Western Cape. He also chaired the board of the University of the North.

He was elected to the ANC's national executive committee in 1991 and was one of the party's delegates to the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), as well as the subsequent Multi-Party Negotiating Forum.

Asmal also chaired the National Conventional Arms Control Committee which decides to whom South Africa should sell arms.

He and his wife Louise have two sons.

• Heart attack claims stalwart Asmal