Mandela’s and other forms of greatness

THEgreatness of Nelson Mandela lies not in his having achieved and wielded power. It lies in his having relinquished power voluntarily at the height of his power.

A former South African student activist who worked for Mandela’s African National Congress told me this in 2004. We met that September at the World Urban Forum in Barcelona, in the Catalan region of Spain. UN Habitat had invited us to exhibit our own cities’ programs – his group’s work helping prevent AIDS and helping its victims, and Baguio’s “Eco-walk” environmental awareness program for and with children. That activist’s observation about true greatness continues to haunt. Time and again, we hear news all over of lesser mortals grabbing and holding on to power as if bequeathed to them in perpetuity by the Almighty. That image also haunts – of their clinging to power at all costs, until it has to be pried off from their closed fists, sometimes over their dead bodies and at the cost of thousands of other lives who had suffered under them.

Their temerity and stubbornness gives you the impression the country’s hardware stores would run out of stocks of Epoxy and other adhesives, these being sold out to politicians pasting themselves to their political chairs.

As we were manning our exhibits away from the forum hall in Barcelona , I learned late that Mikhail Gorbachev, Mandela’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had keynoted the forum the day before.

“Enough is enough,” Gorbachev told the delegates in a searing indictment of tokenism. He bewailed the gaping hole between form and substance, the disunity between theory and practice, between pledge and action in addressing extreme poverty and saving the world since the world leaders signed the UN Millennium Declaration in September 2000.

“We are not living up to our commitments, we are not rising to the challenge,” Gorbachev said. “I am here today to declare that Enough is Enough! Enough broken promises, enough lame excuses.”

Like Mandela, Gorbachev gracefully yielded political power. As president of the USSR, he introduced “glasnost” (openness), “perestroika” (change) and other democratic reforms that eventually undermined his own power and position. So with remarkable grace, he stepped aside as leader to allow the member-nations of the former Soviet Union to achieve independence and chart their own destiny.

Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 “for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community”. He was honored