PRESIDENT Cyril Ramaphosa with president of the UN General Assembly,

Maria Espinosa and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, during the unveiling of the Nelson Mandela statue at the UN headquarters in New York. |

UN LEADERS honoured Nelson Mandela as an inspiration for the world body, an example for democracy and a reminder that “differences are to be celebrated” as a statue of the late Struggle icon was unveiled at the organisation’s headquarters yesterday.

“Nelson Mandela embodied the highest values of the UN – peace, forgiveness, compassion and human dignity,” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said.

This year marks the centenary of Mandela’s birth, and the UN is declaring 2019-2028 as the Nelson Mandela Decade of Peace. A peace summit was scheduled in honour of the prisoner-turned-president later yesterday.

Imprisoned for 27 years, Mandela became the international face of the Struggle to end white minority rule.

Four years after he walked out of jail in 1990, he became the country’s first black president in its first multiracial elections. Over the ensuing decades he became a Nobel peace laureate and global statesman.

“Few people in the history of our world have left such an incredible mark on humanity,” UN General Assembly president Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces said.

Dignitaries and the Mandela family, including his widow, Graça Machel, gathered as a cloth was pulled off a lifesize sculpture of a smiling Mandela.

Espinosa Garces said she hoped the figure’s presence at the UN would serve as “a reminder that our differences are to be celebrated” and that the world body’s work “should always be guided by the inspiration and the promise that Mandela has left us”.

In a speech at the UN in 1994 he said its challenge was “to answer the question – given the interdependence of the nations of the world – what is it that we can and must do to ensure that democracy, peace and prosperity prevail everywhere”.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said Mandela believed the UN “was the most valuable instrument to advance peace in the world and to develop equality and to advance the prospects of humanity generally”. |