Mandela at 90

AS we celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday on July 18, we rejoice that God has spared us our Father of the Nation for so long, and wish him many more years in good health and spirits.

Mr Mandela was incarcerated for those years of his life when his experience and health would have enabled him to make an even more profound contribution to South Africa. How great a nation might South Africa have been under the capable and principled leadership of Mr Mandela, Walter Sisulu and the exiled Oliver Tambo in place of Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha.

Instead, Mr Mandela was labelled a “terrorist”, even by the likes of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (whose appeasement of the apartheid regime was similar to President Thabo Mbeki’s acquiescence in the tyranny in Zimbabwe today).

Events after Mr Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990 showed what those working for justice and peace knew to be true: Nelson Mandela was not a terrorist, but a peacemaker and reconciler. Under his leadership — concrete and symbolic — politicians and civil society worked together to put into place a system which would establish South Africa as a democracy which would be transparent and accountable, with strong structures designed to prevent government abuses.

It would be a naïve exaggeration to claim that these structures were not already under threat when Mr Mandela handed over the presidency to Mr Mbeki. Almost every structure of state intended to cement our democracy — such as the judiciary, law enforcement, state media, even parliament — has been damaged, maybe fundamentally so, by Mr Mbeki’s government and a ruling party which does not heed the difference between a democratic government and the state.

When Mr Mandela addressed the nation and the world from the balcony of Cape Town’s City Hall a few hours after his release on that hot February day in 1990, he restated the words he addressed to the court which condemned him to jail in 1964: “I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

These are noble sentiments. Not yet two decades later, Mr Mandela’s heirs to the leadership in the ANC-led alliance and its Youth League pervert his pledge of martyrdom for the good of the people. When Cosatu leader Zwelenzima Vavi and the Youth League threaten our democratic institutions, and therefore our democracy itself, they corrupt the very principles Mr Mandela was prepared to die for.

Mr Mandela’s lifework — striving for the principles enshrined in the Freedom Charter — is being dismantled, a process which began long before the rise of the Mbeki-Zuma schism in the ANC. Younger ANC leaders have long rejected Mr Mandela’s moral authority, even as they lay claim to his legacy. When Mr Mandela criticised the government’s Aids policy, he was in effect told: “Shut up, old man. Your time is gone.”

Mr Mandela belongs to all of South Africa, and evidently to the whole world. He has become commoditised and idealised (his ex-wife Evelyn once declared that he is no saint). At times, it seems, his advisors have been rather too liberal in granting irrelevant international celebrities access to Mr Mandela.

By all accounts Mr Mandela, a Methodist, is a man of faith. His letter from jail to the late Archbishop Stephen Naidoo of Cape Town, reproduced in this issue, testifies to this, and to his appreciation of the Catholic Church’s work for social justice. How much more puzzling, therefore, that Mr Mandela’s staff declined repeated requests for a statement from him on the death of his friend Archbishop Denis Hurley in 2004.

Mr Mandela’s faith is exercised discreetly; his leadership, however, has been infused with the highest of Christian principles of social justice. It would be a good time now for South Africa’s leaders to return to the models of moral leadership set by the Father of the Nation.