Mandela delivered on his promises
South Africa has celebrated Mandela month at a time when the world is terribly unstable; it is holding its breath as a madman claws his way to the White House, Europe is held hostage by the Brexit vote and, across the Limpopo, Zimbabweans are starting to rise against a senile dictator who wants to take his country to the grave with him.
And South Africa faces the August 3 local government elections with the fiercest build-up yet seen since the dawn of democracy. Political parties are at each others’ throats and racism has reared its ugly head again. If ever there was a time when South Africa and the world needed Nelson Mandela it is now.
Yet when the Democratic Alliance summoned the spirit of the icon in a campaign ad, Mandela’s family and the ANC took offence. The DA argued that, in the present political climate, it believes Mandela would have voted for the DA
But his own words contradict this contention. Speaking about 10 years before his death, Mandela said that when he died and got to heaven he would look for an ANC branch and join it. This was a declaration that he would never forsake the party under whose name he spent his life fighting for freedom, equality and dignity for all South Africans.
At the same time, and despite Mandela’s delivering on what he spent 27 years in jail fighting for, there is a growing feeling among some South Africans that he sold out to white capital. Economic Freedom Front leader Julius Malema fired this salvo in Britain last year.
In a country where many people feel a sense of helplessness and have come to believe that reconciliation has not brought them the dividends of the envisaged “rainbow nation”, many share Malema’s views.
What Malema and his fellow travellers don’t say is whether Mandela should have done what Idi Amin did to Asians in 1972, when he expelled them from Uganda, accusing them of holding on to the country’s wealth and crippling its economy.
Today, we see a resurgence of bigotry and racism. Xenophobia is threatening to cripple even Britain. And Swaziland has joined the madness: its Parliament recently ordered the minister for home affairs not to give Asians permits to enter and live in the country or to trade.
When Mandela delivered freedom, equality and dignity to the people of South Africa, and reminded the world that these were the key to peace and stability everywhere, he may not have given his people economic redemption.
But he gave them a much better chance to pursue their happiness as they deemed fit, free of the whims of whites who had believed this was their exclusive preserve.
Ma n d e l a ’ s former personal assistant, Zelda la Grange, in her book Good Morning, Mr Mandela, writes about an incident in August 2008, when Mandela arrived at 10 Downing Street with his wife Graça Machel, to meet then British prime minister Gordon Brown.
Mandela told the media: “My wife and I are proud and happy to be here because, as you know, this was one of our rulers, but we overthrew him.”
Two things about Mandela come out of this incident. The first is that as a free man, his dignity restored, he saw himself on an equal footing with the people of a race that hitherto considered itself superior.
Second, he was sending a message to the world that, though it was important that South Africa maintain relations with the world’s most powerful nations, he had not arrived with a begging bowl but would discuss matters of mutual interest, as equals, with Brown. That is how free people behave, after all.
South Africa is endowed with natural wealth as well as well-developed infrastructure; its relative technological advancement could allow its people to pursue and live a comfortable economic life. But not everyone can find that comfort zone.
Political pundits in South Africa now claim that the answer to the economic discontent faced by many revolves around the question of land. This argument, unfortunately, has an undertone hinting that the land must be taken away from white farmers as happened in Zimbabwe.
Given the lessons learnt from that country, however, this kind of talk smacks of opportunism. Its biggest danger is that it could plunge South Africa into an economic crisis that would be very difficult to recover from.
Mandela did not take the selfish and self-destructive decision to seize white people’s wealth. He would not have been able, even if he had tried, to level the playing field so that all South Africans started the new political dispensation on an equal economic footing. But he delivered the best Constitution in the world,one that guarantees everyone, regardless of race, an equal opportunity to pursue happiness.
For that, he deserves all the credit some now seek to deny him.