Opinion | Columnists

A great legacy that is being wasted

Those who have succeeded Mandela as South African president have failed to continue his good work

  • By Peter Bruce, Special to Gulf News
  • Published: 00:00 February 11, 2010
  • Gulf News

Nelson Mandela is quite aware that his funeral has already been minutely planned. The BBC has an aircraft ready to leave Stansted Airport for South Africa within five hours of his death, loaded with studios and editors and correspondents.

It has booked its camera positions for the official state funeral. Local newspapers have their commemorative issues already written and set up, ready to print.

Tony Blair will have written something. And Bill Clinton. Even yours truly has been booked as talking head on a major US network. Barack Obama will come and so will Fidel Castro.

It's been 20 years since Mandela walked out of prison and brought democracy to a tyranny almost, it sometimes seemed, on his own. But those heady days of his release in 1990 and his election as president in 1994 are long gone.

Now South Africans wait with resignation for him to die knowing, for sure, that the promise he brought has been wasted by his successors and that where we were once special, we have become ordinary and even foolish.

Mandela, or Madiba as he is affectionately known, makes only rare public appearances these days. When he does it is to support his party, the ruling African National Congress (ANC), or to celebrate a rare anniversary. He is frail but good humoured, hard of hearing and cannot walk much without assistance.

They say it is just as well he does not follow politics because the travails of his party would wound him deeply. The ANC he spent his adult life in jail to defend is now fragmented and divided. It cannot heal.

Mandela served only one term as president. By the time it was over many South Africans were quietly satisfied. He had brought great honour on the country but headway on the big political and economic challenges the country faces had been painfully slow.

He was all feel-good and no action. We needed, we thought, a modern political manager, someone who could get things done.

Boy, are we sorry now. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, turned out to be an eloquent and elegant disaster.

He didn't think the HIV virus caused Aids, he thought the country's high crime rate was a figment of white racist imaginations, he protected a painfully dubious head of the national police service when prosecutors tried to arrest him. Worst of all, he virtually guaranteed his successor's victory at a party congress in 2007 by refusing to stand down and let someone else challenge Jacob Zuma.

Widely despised

Economically, Mbeki talked a good game but played a rotten one. He completely missed the commodities boom in the early years of the century and frittered away its potential to heal poverty by chasing black economic empowerment programmes that, if anything, have merely deepened the wealth gap in the country. By the time he was ousted near the end of his second term, Mbeki was widely despised.

Nonetheless, his removal from office was shameful, brought about by a baying coalition of lefitists and nationalists within the ANC. Zuma (after a brief interregnum in which an acting president was appointed) was the tool they used the remove him, but Zuma has quickly run into trouble of his own since his election to the presidency last year.

Zuma carries arguably more political debt than any local politician in history. Under Mbeki the party and its ruling alliance partners — the unions and the communists — had split on ideological lines.

Zuma's coming has created another fault-line — this time between African nationalists and communists and socialists. It is a drama that has yet to play itself out but hardly a week goes by these days without someone remarking that it is just as well Mandela isn't aware of it all.

The big job — the one Mandela had and the same one Mbeki faced and now Zuma must confront — is how to hold the ruling alliance together. It is an old union, harking back 50 years and it is important to the ANC because the unions and the communists are so well organised at election times. But it is being tested by new wealth and the nationalist grab for it.

The remarkable thing about South Africa though is that while the politics is cheap and nasty, ordinary citizens are quietly getting on with crafting a new society. It is a genuine and open democracy.

Civil society is boisterous and difficult and loud. The press is completely free. The richer blacks become, the more prominent class divides become. Race, though useful to politicians, is slowly receding as a measure of things in the country.

Mandela would be aware of that too and it would please him. In many respects, Zuma has rekindled the reconciliatory tone that Mandela had and which Mbeki thought was absurd. He has reached out to poor whites and Afrikaners particularly.

But Zuma is hampered by the party he inherited from Mbeki and Mandela and from his own campaign to lead it. The ANC will only be healed by an honest, ideological split, where the Left forms its own party and try to govern in coalition with the ANC, on terms they can at least partly dictate.

Sadly, it is no longer something Mandela can influence. There are young hotheads building positions in the ANC hierarchy who were barely conscious when he was released. The true measure of Mandela's legacy will be whether the South African society he set free still has the strength of character to stand up to a new tyranny.

Peter Bruce is the editor of Business Day, a daily newspaper in Johannesburg. He was previously editor of the Financial Mail in Johannesburg and Madrid bureau chief of the Financial Times.

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