The other side of the Madiba magic

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is undeniably one of the most charismatic, suave and diplomatic statesmen that South Africa and the world ever had. His humility and down-to-earth temperament was once again expressed by his insistence on his 91st birthday that post-apartheid South Africa is the product of the collective struggle of all South Africans, rather than the work of one man or one political party.

This is in contrast to rigorous efforts to romanticise and deify Madiba, even at the expense of falsification of history. This misrepresentation of history and events often is by omission and obfuscation. A clear example of this is attempts by the current leadership of the tripartite alliance and many in the media and academia to attribute all the failures of the ANC-led government to Thabo Mbeki, without acknowledging that the so-called class of 96 project was actually a consolidation of the project initiated by Mandela in 1994 and even long before that. Very often the name of Nelson Mandela is evoked whenever former president Thabo Mbeki is projected as the guy who steered the ANC-led government away from whatever egalitarian precepts contained in the Freedom Charter, and who took South Africa down the path of unbridled capitalism.

The fact of the matter is that it is Nelson Mandela who first publicly recanted the Freedom Charter’s stance on the nationalisation of the mines and mineral resources of the land. People without selective memory will recall that shortly after his release, Nelson Mandela made a pro-nationalisation statement, which elicited an outburst of anger and criticism from the captains of industry. The following day Mandela withdrew his statement and avowedly assured Big Business that nationalisation was never and will never be part of ANC policy. It is under Nelson Mandela’s leadership that the ANC consented to the sunset clause, the repayment of the apartheid debts and the guarantee of property rights. The sunset clause effectively slowed the process of initiating demographic representativeness within the army, civil service and other state/public institutions. The property clause effectively stood as a safety valve against the nationalisation and socialisation of strategic areas of the economy, and also ensured that the land redistribution project becomes locked to the failed willing-buyer, willing seller arrangement.

As Mandela himself made a public confession, the huge amounts of money that goes to servicing the apartheid debt constitutes one the major barriers to the capacity of the government to deliver services and address the inequities and imbalances of that exist in South Africa. It was under the reign of the same Mandela that the government vigorously pursued the structural adjustment programme of privatisation and deregulation of state assets and public enterprises, relaxation of taxation on Big Capital, and relaxation of trade and tariff rates.

Trying to please big capital with lower tax resulted in the poor having to fit the bill in the form of increased pay as you earn (PAYE) and increased value added tax (VAT). Trade and tariff liberalisation caused tremendous harm to the local industry and the workforce that become retrenched and unemployed as a result of companies being forced to downsize or wind up. The textile, clothing and manufacturing companies are particularly squeezed by cheep proliferation of foreign material that are products of child labour and slavery wages and exploitative conditions in the sweatshops of Eastern countries. In the face of all this, Mandela asked the labourers to tighten the belt to help kick-start the skorokoro capitalist economy, with promises that the benefits of enhanced growth will slowly trickle down to the poor.

When it became clear that the trickle-down effect is just a mirage, civil society organisations and the labour movement increased protests against the Growth and Redistribution strategy. Instead of heeding to popular opinion, Mandela used his charm and the veneration and respect that the people have for him to dismiss protestations against GEAR (Growth, employment and redistribution). Again, people without a short memory or deliberate amnesia will remember how Mandela went to a COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) congress and tongue-in-cheek, rebuffed the concerns and demands of the people against his government’s neoliberal trajectory and told all and sundry that GEAR was the lock and key of ANC economic policy and was going nowhere. So, while Mbeki had to resort to bureaucratic centralism and intellectual chauvinism to repulse popular opinion and popular demands, Mandela had the luxury of the Madiba charm – an exaggerated sense of awe and reverence towards him which almost render him beyond reproach.

How many of us are willing to concede that the political deployment of party faithfuls to managerial positions in public enterprises and executive positions in the public sector, and the cronyism and nepotism that dogged the Thabo Mbeki government started in 1994, under the watchful eye of our beloved Madiba? How many of us are willing to recall that some of the incidents of police brutality against popular dissent as well as acts of intolerance towards dissenting views happened while Mandela was the leader of both the ANC and the government? How many of us would be brave enough to put the name of Mandela in the mix when speaking about ANC leaders who owe the public an account of the arms deal fiasco?

I listened with interest at a COSATU rally in Durban last year when Zwelinzima Vavi, Dr Blade Nzimande and others said that although Mandela was the president when the government ignored the alarm raised by Eskom that there was a need for another electricity station, the blame for the electricity crisis should be put squarely on the shoulders of Thabo Mbeki who was the deputy president then. Vavi and his colleagues argued that at that time Thabo Mbeki was the de facto final voice within the presidency. Strange when it comes to the account of miracles that happened between 1994 and 1996, all the glory goes to the Madiba, and when it comes to the bad decisions and anti-poor policies we are told that the real man at helm was TM. Our love for leaders, including Mandela – who really deserves the reverence we have for him – should not seduce us into jazzing up history.

Yes, Mandela is a great man of peace and tolerance, but he is also the architect of neoliberal, neo-capitalist dispensation. The effable, amiable and peaceable Mandela who said the government was open to negotiation on the ‘boere staat’ idea is the same person who annoyingly pointed a menacing finger at journalist who questioned his visit to hailing of Verwoed’s widow as ‘a wife of a hero’ on his visit to racist Orania, accusing these journalists of undermining his government’s reconciliation endeavours, which many of us found to be one-sided. When TM started throwing the ultra-leftist and racist label on whoever differed with the ANC policies, he was only following in the footsteps of his predecessor.

How many of our independent analysts and academics or revolutionary poets and underground emcees will utter these unpalatable truths about dear Madiba? Does Madiba approve of this selective memory over his life and history? I want to believe that Madiba – who, despite my beef with him ideologically, I have come to appreciate and love as a great human being and a statesman par excellence – would love to be remembered not as a god and perfect person, but as an ordinary individual, with excellent personality and outstanding charisma and statesmanship – but human still, prone to error, capable of misjudgement on issues, and open to questioning. I therefore want to submit that the deification of Mandela is not the best way to pay homage to him, and selective memory on any of our leaders, Stephen Bantu Biko, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Oliver Tambo, Winnie Madikizela Mandela, etc is not doing a service to their legacy and to the heritage of this great nation.

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* Mphutlane wa Bofelo is a writer-activist with a passion for using creative education, literature and theatre as tools for transformation and development.
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