Mandela felt betrayed by Zuma corruption – Hain
Peter Hain was a friend of Nelson Mandela, who was born 100 years ago last week. Here, chief reporter Martin Shipton reviews Lord Hain’s new book, which discusses whether Mandela’s legacy has been betrayed...
FEW people are better qualified than Peter Hain to write a biography of Nelson Mandela. Hain was a schoolboy in South Africa when Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) were put on trial for terrorist offences. His mother, a leading anti-apartheid activist, would bring food to Mandela and his comrades when the court broke for lunch.
After Mandela was jailed for life, the Hain family was forced into exile in Britain, where Peter became the most recognisable face of the antiapartheid movement, campaigning in particular for the sporting boycott of South Africa.
He first met Mandela in 1994, four years after his release from prison, to take part in the talks that culminated in the end of apartheid. In June 1998 Hain was a Welsh Office minister when Mandela came to Cardiff to be awarded the Freedom of the City. After singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with some primary school children, Mandela asked Hain’s father Walter – another veteran anti-apartheid activist – if he was still causing trouble.
Hain’s new book – Mandela: The Essential Life – provides a concise and highly readable account of one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century. But while Hain greatly admires Mandela, the book doesn’t cross the line and become mere hagiography. He dissects the sometimes bitter disagreements between those who were desperate to end whitesonly rule, and doesn’t shy away from the fact that Mandela was by no means a saint.
Nevertheless, the book makes a powerful case in support of the generally accepted view that its subject was an outstanding statesman whose unique qualities averted an unthinkable bloodbath.
Hain then discusses whether Mandela’s admirable legacy has been betrayed by the movement he founded.
Describing Mandela’s “magic”, Hain writes: “It was not just his towering moral stature, his courage and his capacity to inspire that endeared Nelson Mandela to so many. Despite being one of the world’s most prominent statesmen – perhaps the most revered – he retained his extraordinary humanity. When he was with you, you had all his attention. When he greeted you, his eyes never wandered, even though you were surrounded by more important people, whether you were a mere child, a hotel porter, a cleaner, a waiter or a junior staff member. And he never forgot a friend.”
But, writes Hain, “This ordinariness combined with extraordinariness is not Mandela’s sole uniqueness. His capacity for forgiveness is what made him the absolutely critical figure, first during secret negotiations with the Afrikaner Nationalist government in the late 1980s from prison and then after his release.”
Mandela became the first postapartheid president of South Africa. Hain assesses the huge challenges facing the new administration, asking how it was possible to create a prosperous, united, rights-based society when 80% of people lived in endemic poverty. The problem was exacerbated by a growing population, together with continuous migration from impoverished rural subsistence economies to harsh urban squatter destitution – on top of which there was an influx of more than two million African immigrants from countries further north. High violent crime rates came to affect whites, unlike under apartheid, when most crime was black-onblack in the townships. The apartheid policy of preventing black South Africans from acquiring the necessary education to work in a modern industrialised society adversely affected three-quarters of the population.
Nevertheless, points out Hain, in its first 20 years of democratic government, the ANC built more than three million new homes and created four million jobs. Millions more South Africans secured running water and electricity.
Importantly, the ANC created a welfare state that provided a vital social safety net for up to 17 million vulnerable people who previously were not covered.
However, under President Jacob Zuma – who was forced to resign earlier this year – corruption proliferated and South Africa’s economic indicators plummeted. Hain writes: “In his last years, Mandela was deeply pained by a corrosive increase in cronyism and corruption. Reluctant to criticise his successors publicly, he privately felt betrayed and bitterly disappointed.”
School budgets suffered, not because of cuts, but because they were badly managed or siphoned off through dodgy tender processes. Shockingly, Hain points out that the extent to which corruption had spread throughout society was confirmed in December 2017, when it was discovered that monies intended for Mandela’s 2013 funeral had been stolen by Eastern Cape government officials.
He does, though, see hope in the election of former trade union leader Cyril Ramaphosa as South Africa’s fourth post-apartheid president.
Accepting that there will never be another quite like Mandela, Hain concludes with one of his memorable proverbs: “What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others.”
■ Mandela: His Essential Life by Peter Hain is published by Rowman & Littlefield at £9.99.
[Mandela’s] capacity for forgiveness is what made him the absolutely critical figure PETER HAIN