Nelson Mandela: neither sell-out nor saint

[Steve Hayes]

Nelson Mandela: neither sell-out nor saint

Mandela saved my country from a bloodbath, but his focus on the symbols of
reconciliation was at the expense of real economic reform in South Africa

Zakes Mda
The Guardian, Friday 6 December 2013 13.20 GMT

Nelson Mandela was the last of a great generation of freedom fighters who
guided South Africa's liberation struggle from the early days of the African
National Congress Youth League in the 1940s. South Africans have fond memories
of these leaders – men and women such as Albertina and Walter Sisulu, Oliver
Tambo, Anton Lembede and Govan Mbeki – particularly in today's political
climate, which is characterised by greed and rampant accumulation of wealth,
often through corruption. These people demonstrated the kind of morality and
selflessness that is lacking in South African political life today. That is
why Mandela was loved by the majority of South Africans, black and white.

Each time he was taken ill, this outpouring of love came through clearly from
radio talkshow callers and TV vox pops. But that love is not universal in
South Africa. There are many white die-hards who still see him as a terrorist
who should never have been released from prison. They are disgruntled about
their loss of power and privilege, and they vent that in comments on various
South African newspaper websites. At the other end of the spectrum are the
black youngsters who are disillusioned with the "new" South Africa and hold
Mandela personally responsible for betraying the revolution.

Two years ago, a two-day information blackout after he had been taken to
hospital resulted in the first flurry of speculation on his medical condition.
South Africans feared that he was either dying or was already dead. But some
black youths were in despair for different reasons. Malaika wa Azania, a
19-year-old radical from Soweto who was at that time gaining a following among
youth throughout the country, posted on Facebook: "Mandela must not die yet.
No no no. That would be unfair. People don't get away with crime. Neither must
he …" Her voice was loudest on social media, but she made inroads in
mainstream media, writing newspaper opinion pieces on why the settlement
reached between the ANC and the white apartheid government in the early 1990s
was a fraud perpetrated on black people who are yet to regain their land,
stolen by whites during colonial conquest.

This young woman is not a voice in the wilderness. One of the many who think
like her is Andile Mngxitama, a pamphleteer who travels the country rallying
youth against the establishment, which he feels continues to be anti-black.
His stomping grounds are the university campuses. Such disparate voices claim
that Mandela failed black people and sold them out to white capital. His
policy of reconciliation did not serve the interests of poor blacks but,
instead, reinforced white supremacy, they assert.

I understand the disillusionment of these young people, although I do not
share their perspective. To me, Mandela was neither the devil they make him
out to be nor the saint that most of my compatriots and the international
community think he was. I see him as a skilful politician, smart enough to
resist the megalomania that comes with deification. I do not think the policy
of reconciliation was ill-advised; it saved the country from a bloodbath and
ushered in a period of prosperity.

But therein lies the rub. The distribution of that prosperity was very skewed.
South Africa has never been a place of equal opportunity, and that was
reinforced instead of changed by Mandela's presidency. His focus on the
symbols and atmospherics of reconciliation was at the expense of real economic
reform. The disillusionment of young black South Africans began when he was
president. So did the unbridled accumulation of wealth by the ruling party
apparatchiks, accompanied by the marginalisation of all those deemed to lack
"struggle credentials". While cadres of the party gained positions of power
and wealth, both in the public and private sectors, the rest of the black
population remained poor and unemployed.

In December 1997, I wrote to Mandela, lamenting the corruption, patronage and
crony capitalism I felt was taking root. "The youth have a perception that
generally our political leaders are thoroughly rotten," I wrote. "Many of our
youth are despondent and have lost hope. The older ones talk of having been
used as cannon fodder in the struggle, yet now they are forgotten while the
leaders ride on the gravy train."

To his credit, Mandela was swift in his response. He phoned and arranged that
I meet three of his cabinet ministers to discuss my concerns. The ministers
didn't seem to see the seriousness of the situation, but it enhanced my
respect for Mandela. He obviously was concerned, but somehow couldn't rein in
his comrades' unbridled greed.

I admired Mandela as a statesman: he came out of prison after almost three
decades speaking of compassion and inclusiveness. I was surprised by his tone
of tolerance and reconciliation, having known him from the early 1950s when he
worked with my father, Ashby Peter Mda; they were founders of the ANC Youth
League. Mandela was a fire-breathing revolutionary then, a far cry from the
benevolent statesman he became.

Despite my admiration and those early connections, I have been very critical
of some of his positions. As a columnist on the Sunday Times during his
presidency, I was scathing when his statesmanship got in the way of truth and
he lamented the death of a murderous African dictator, Sani Abacha, calling it
a loss to Africa. I was just as critical when he defended the deputy speaker
of parliament who was alleged to have obtained a fraudulent driver's licence.

Mandela was extremely loyal to his comrades, sometimes to a fault. This led to
the false perception that he condoned corruption. In fact, in his later years,
as a retired statesman and an ailing man, he was a victim of that very
corruption, surrounded by characters who – despite the gallant efforts of the
Nelson Mandela Foundation to protect him – were keen to cash in on his name
and even his death. Now the statesman has taken leave of us and our problems.

He has earned his rest.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/06/nelson-mandela-statesman-saved-south-africa-economic-reform

[Topaz]

"South Africa's regression towards primeval barbarism, which Benson
details, is quite neatly summarised at the head of his article: "A
woman is raped every 28 seconds, qualified doctors are leaving in
droves, while beggars and goats have set up home in the marble foyers
of derelict banks. South Africa today has become a nation on the edge
of self-destruction."

Law and order have to all intents and purposes broken down in South
Africa. Any sense of security no longer exists. Says Benson of the
country's crime:-
"Farmers are butchered in their fields. The parks and beaches have
become killing fields. Car-jackings with mind-numbing violence are a
daily occurrence. The murder rate is running at 27,000 a year."

Benson then repeats the horrifying statistics for rape, of which more
will be said.
These figures, he comments, "breed the kind of fear that has you
leaping at shadows, jumping red lights and climbing out of bed in the
middle of the night to check, yet again, that you have double-locked
the doors."

For you to protect your home even halfway adequately, it now seems
that you need to pay an 'armed response' security firm. But whatever
you do is never enough. One black businessman told Benson that he had
lost count of the numbers of his friends who had been mugged.

Everyone is in the firing line. No social gathering can take place
without horror stories being exchanged. But at this point we get some
hint of the censorship that hitherto has been mobilised to keep as
much as possible of the truth from the public gaze (presumably an
increasingly difficult task in the ever-worsening crisis engulfing the
country). A white security man commented on the criminal mayhem: "It's
happening to your friends, your brother, his wife, your sister, your
mother," but, "it isn't something you read in the papers or hear about
on the television news any more."

Adds Benson: "He carried a gun, but he wasn't fooling himself. He knew
it could happen to him. In Mandela's 'Rainbow Nation' the dream is
running blood red."
Clearly, South Africa's new ANC (African National Congress) Government
is almost neurotically aware that the legitimacy of its rule is at
stake here.

Decline of a city
Nowhere is the situation worse than in Johannesburg, where it is
exemplified in all its worst manifestations. Benson gives a graphic
description of how that unhappy city has declined. Here too, he comes
courageously close to modern-day heresy in giving the White Man his
historic due as the true creator of South Africa's original productive
infra-structure (a subject today largely taboo in a world sold on the
'politically correct' elevation of the non-European at the expense of
the European), and also focusing on the White Man's predicament now.

In a striking characterisation of the city, Benson writes:-
"Built on the largest seam of gold ever discovered, this was once the
richest city in Africa, a gleaming steel-and-glass citadel rising out
of the brown ocean of the Veld, a testament to the economic power (and
perhaps the innate character? JM) of the white community that built
it, but also an example of what can be achieved by hard work and
individual enterprise."
And now? "the skyscrapers are still there," he continues, "but the
people who gave them life and prosperity have gone, driven out by
hordes of squatters, beggars and illegal traders who bought Mandela's
promise of a 'better life for all' - and demanded instant delivery."

He continues:-
"Barbecues made of old oil cans blaze in the marble foyers of what
used to be the headquarters of banks and airlines. There are goats
tethered in hallways. Corrugated iron huts have sprung up on the
once-manicured lawns.
"This is not an environment in which any respectable business person,
be they black or white, can live or work - and most have fled."

Benson next proceeds to a grim and frightening account of what has
been very rapid urban and social decay in the centre of a city in
which I once lived and worked myself. Now, even big business is
quitting a metropolis of which it was once the raison d'être.
The country's flag carrier, South African Airlines, has taken refuge
in the distant outer suburbs. The big mining houses (which practically
built the town) and even the Stock Exchange are to follow suit. It is
evident they can hardly remain in a city centre in which it is unsafe
for their employees to travel to and from work. Benson also reports
that the Carlton Hotel has closed and sold all its contents, and "the
Holiday Inn is a deserted fortress, its 800 empty rooms protected by
reinforced steel shutters." It is as if the London Hilton, the
Dorchester and our other luxury hotels were to close down because
order had totally collapsed, and the city had become uninhabitable!
All this is the tale of one of the world's major cities crumbling into
chaos and dereliction, perhaps one day in the not too distant future
to become as defunct as ancient Babylon.

It is now impossible even to walk in any degree of safety to the South
African Supreme Court building to get one's case heard. The alleyways
leading to it are prowled by muggers who, says Benson, "are not open
to appeal." Although the court still goes through the motions of
administering the law, this has, comments Benson, "helped ease the
backlog of cases" in a country where, as other commentators have
noted, 'affirmative action' has led to the colonisation of the bench
by magistrates who are illiterate, incompetent, corrupt and racially
and politically biased, and routinely bail murderers and rapists back
into the community to re-offend. Cases are never dealt with, crime
explodes - no law, no order!

Fear at night
No wonder Central Johannesburg is now so much a place to avoid,
especially at night. "As dusk falls," says Benson...
"... the streets start filling with prostitutes and criminals pushing
drugs, and pills that turn a black skin white - before eventually
killing you (if AIDS hasn't claimed you first; up to 10 per cent of
the population is carrying the virus and three quarters of the entire
health budget will soon be spent on treating the incurable).
"You can hear the occasional sound of gunfire rolling down from
Hillbrow, by cruel coincidence Johannesburg's first integrated
neighbourhood."
To many, including me (who once lived in that very high-rise
district), this does not seem so much of a coincidence.

Implicitly referring to the consequences of 'affirmative action',
Benson describes how...
"... the police keep promising to move in and clean the place up; they
never do, and if they did it probably wouldn't make any difference:
the Minister in charge of so-called security recently admitted to
parliament that a policeman is three times more likely to commit a
serious crime than an average member of the public."
Summarising his observations of Johannesburg, Benson comments:-
"So much for the dream. This is the reality - and it is a shocking
one, worse than I had anticipated. I have seen cities abandoned in
war. This is the first city I have ever seen abandoned to the
barbarians in time of peace.'
So what of the luckless Whites, themselves abandoned amid this chaos
to the consequences of 'multiracial democracy'? This, Benson makes
clear, is not only a tale of de facto displacement by conditions of
social chaos which white people find utterly intolerable; this in
itself has caused mass white migrations. In Johannesburg those who opt
to remain in proximity to the city have retreated to its northern
outer suburbs. But there is a mass movement, in effect recoiling on
the old pioneer routes, back to Cape Province, the region of South
Africa in which Europeans first touched land. It is estimated that in
five years 80 per cent of the country's Whites will be clustered
towards the Cape.

Even in the Cape there is now a project to establish at least one
urban area, some miles into the interior outside Cape Town, which will
in practice be a fortified settlement. With property priced beyond
what most Blacks, and quite a few poor Whites, could possibly afford,
it is, at the size of Monaco, to be protected by a 33,000-volt fence
and patrolled by armed guards.

But in addition, fearful of lawlessness, the white population is also
being harassed and persecuted by the law. As Benson comments:-
"The government has lost the battle of the streets but they have
control of parliament, and they have used their power to pass
legislation aimed specifically at one ethnic group."
Instead of apartheid, there is now 'affirmative action', whereby
Whites are de jure displaced from their jobs and deprived of their
incomes to make way for Blacks, without regard for the latter's
qualifications or abilities, but purely on racial grounds in order to
"redress past imbalances."

The result? Air traffic controllers are now being appointed who cannot
read their instruments. According to Commissioner of Police George
Fivaz, 30,000 of his officers are "functionally illiterate." To
supplement the facts quoted by Benson, one may add the purging of the
health services over two years ago (as also reported at the time in
the Daily Mail, by Peter Younghusband, the paper's then South African
correspondent) by the Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma, who replaced
district surgeons and doctors with Cuban recruits competent neither in
the English language nor as medical practitioners.

Working class whites thrown on scrapheap
Working class Whites are now being dumped and paid a miserable dole to
make way for Africans. Benson quotes the example of a bus driver
sacked after 17 years service. For blue-collar Whites, "the economic
trap-door has opened beneath them and dropped them below the poverty
line. Unemployed and never likely to be employed, their children
ragged and barefoot, dependent on benefits of £150 a month each, which
is often not paid (the social services are being 'reorganised - and
there's a sinister phrase!). Some families can no longer afford to
feed themselves." These now rely on church soup kitchens.
Apparently, whilst the violently racist anti-white politician Patricia
De Lille says that Tony Blair has donated £20,000 to the home for sick
children for which she works, "no-one," says Benson, "is digging in
their pockets to help poor Whites. They are off the end of Mandela's
rainbow, without a pot of gold in sight."

The Government in the new South Africa is intolerant of opposition.
According to white Democratic Party opposition leader Tony Leon, "they
want everyone to be 'on side'. If you criticise them - and we do
vigorously - they call you neo-nazi racists" (a strange epithet
considering that Leon is Jewish). It seems that even Patricia De Lille
- whose Pan-Africanist Party's slogan is "One settler [i.e. white
person], one bullet" - has been "battered by this accusation." The
cause? She has been taking the ANC Government and its Ministers to
task for the stupendous corruption whereby they have turned themselves
and their most privileged supporters into a new class of fat cats (all
very typical of post-colonial Africa).

Free school lunches promised by Mandela fail to reach the children;
family allowances are not paid; council houses are so jerry-built they
are virtually uninhabitable. But when these failures come under
criticism as in the case of de Lille the response of the Government
under the new president Mbeki is to threaten her with expulsion from
parliament for being 'racist', and bring in legislation to outlaw
criticism of a person's 'private life' which might "impair their
dignity." De Lille asks where the money for these public projects
went, and answers "into someone's pocket."

There was corruption under South Africa's ancien regime, as there is
any country in the world under any government. But it was never, as it
is today, on a scale sufficient to cause the collapse of whole areas
of public administration.

In a nutshell, then, thanks to Ross Benson, we now have an overview of
the 'New South Africa' from which to take stock. What we see is a
picture of vicious and exploding crime, of chaos verging on anarchy,
of corruption and incompetence way beyond anything in the country's
past, and of the racial harassment and persecution of the white
minority - the people who actually built the country in the first
place, and without whom there would have been literally nothing for
their successors to take over and bring to ruin.
It is not a picture which those with their heads screwed on the right
way did not predict, decades ago, as the likely outcome of majority
rule - though such people were then, and would still now be, vilified
as "right-wing, racist reactionaries." or worse. Such a fate has come
upon Ross Benson, who has been roundly denounced in sections of the
South African media, according to a second article by correspondent
David Jones, also writing from Johannesburg, published in the Mail two
weeks after his own.

Backlash
The Mail's own letters page witnessed a similar backlash of censorious
intolerance in the week following the publication of Benson's report.
This response looked a little like a co-ordinated 'write-in' against
Benson by aggrieved ANC supporters in Britain. This was in spite of
Jones' characterisation of his piece as a "painfully accurate article
about the demise of post-apartheid South Africa." It is worth pointing
out that neither Benson nor Jones have any record of being 'racists'
or supporters of apartheid - something that ought to be self-evident,
to those in the know, by the fact that they have access to the columns
of a major national newspaper like the Daily Mail.

In a second Spearhead article to follow, we will be looking at Jones's
report, which is mainly on the subject of rape - now at a higher
incidence in South Africa than anywhere else in the world. This will
include the vexed question of racially motivated rape. We will also be
considering questions of ethnic cleansing and censorship - mostly
informal - as they apply to that country"

John Morse
Spearhead Online


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