South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has taken more than 59 percent of the votes in the national election after a third of the ballots were counted, the electoral commission said on Thursday.
Reuters reports that the ANC’s main rival, the Democratic Alliance, had more than 27 percent, while the ultra-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) had just above four percent.
South Africa’s former President Nelson Mandela left an estate valued at more than 46m rand ($4.13m; £2.53m), the executors of his Will have revealed.
The Mandela family trust will receive $130,000, plus royalties. Others to benefit include the governing ANC, personal staff and several schools.
Mr Mandela’s third wife, Graca Machel, may waive her claims to the estate, the executors said, although she is entitled to half of it.
Mr Mandela died on December 5, last year, aged 95.
The former president left behind an estate that includes an upmarket house in Johannesburg, a modest dwelling in his rural Eastern Cape home province and royalties from book sales, including his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.
Executor Justice Dikgang Moseneke said he was “not aware of any contest” to the 40-page Will.
Speaking at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, Mr Moseneke said some of the estate would be split between three trusts set up by Mr Mandela, including a family trust designed to provide for his more than 30 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Schools the former president attended are due to receive 100,000 rand each, as are Wits and Fort Hare Universities, for bursaries and scholarships.
The family trust will receive 1.5m rand, plus royalties.
The ANC will also receive some royalties, to be used at the discretion of the party’s executive committee, to spread information about the principles and policies of the ANC, particularly about reconciliation.
Mr Mandela’s children each received $300,000 in loans during his lifetime and will have that debt scrapped if it has not been repaid.
Close personal staff, including long-time personal aide Zelda la Grange, each get 50,000 rand.
The home in Houghton, Johannesburg where Mandela died on December 5 will be used by the family of his deceased son Makgatho.
“It is my wish that it should also serve as a place of gathering of the Mandela family in order to maintain its unity long after my death,” the former statesman wrote.
The mood of the Mandela family when the Will was read was “charged with emotions, but it went well,” said the executor, who added that the Mandela family were “well pleased” by his Will.
Despite this, there are fears the Will could set off another round of squabbling among members of his large and factious family.
Justice Moseneke, who is also deputy head of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, said there was a 90-day period in which the Will can be contested.
The Will was first written in 2004 and last amended in 2008.
The leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), South Africa chapter, Bola Babarinde, spoke on the prospects of the party in the 2015 elections and the agitation by Nigerians in the Diaspora for voting rights. MUSA ODOSHIMOKHE met him.
Could you compare politics, party system and governance in South Africa with the Nigerian experience? Are there similarities?
Nigeria was one of the main hubs. The leadership of African National Congress (ANC) looked up to Nigeria during the dark days of apartheid. Our own dark days may be the military regimes that plunged the country into recession . Politics in South Africa and Nigeria are similar in that we have the frontline political party, ANC, in South Africa and the PDP in Nigeria. While the ANC is formed on a strong political ideology and it has a focus, I doubt, if the same can be said of the PDP in Nigeria. The ANC has survived for over 100 years, but I am not sure, if the PDP will survive that long going by the internal crises that is rocking the party in recent times. While the ANC took the issue of service delivery and fulfilling promises to the people as very important, the PDP is rather self-serving and mainly serves the leadership of the organisation. That is why everybody must jostle to be in the leadership position in the PDP. Also, the ANC will allow youth to thrive and have a vibrant ANC Youth League that contributes meaningfully to the political happenings in South Africa. Our own leading political party lacks such ideas and the PDP only takes pride in recyling the leaders of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. I wonder how the statement, “the youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow” will ever be realised, if this continues. I laughed when I see that a man who was a governor in 1983; the former Chairman of the PDP, was recently given the herculean task of reviving the National Railway Corporation. I guess a man in his 80’s should be given a task of sitting pretty well in his retirement home enjoying himself with his grandchildren and giving meaningful advise to politicians.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was on a five-month long strike and the comment credited to the Senate President, David Mark, was that the people that represented the Federal Government in the original negotiation possibly did not read the document completely before they signed it irresponsibly. I looked at the document and checked the profile of the representatives of the Federal Government in the negotiation. While I do not know the age of all members, I saw many highly respected industrialists and retired professors and top civil servants in the eight-man committee and I know that the retirement age is 65. The youngest is the Executive Secretary of Education Trust Fund (ETF). Now, tell me, how will you realistically expect a 70 year old or more to sit and be reading a 51-page highly technical document, when he should possibly be having fading eyesight, relaxing with the grandkids and reading newspapers? Serious business must be taken seriously. A single look at the 2014 budget will tell us in which direction the country is facing.
How can corruption be tackled?
Corruption happens in all political realms, but what is done about it differs. In South Africa, people have a total belief in the “Office of the Public Protector (OPP)”, who investigates and gives credible opinion and possible prosecution on all matters. In Nigeria, although we have similar organisations in ICPC and EFCC, I ,if people have the same level of trust in these organisations. Such offices are not in name, but in actions. The lady heading the OPP in South Africa has won many awards locally and internationally for her work and has stood against the ANC government many times. She recently investigated the financing of President Zuma’s house using public funds and gave a damning preliminary report. Although some people in South Africa went to the court to stop her releasing her final report, she went to defend the people in court and won the case. The full report will be out in public space any time from now. I doubt, if anybody in the EFCC or the ICPC can try such feat in Nigeria. Well, our organisations are not independent in the first instance. We need a strong unbiased independent anti-corruption body like it exists in South Africa, which can call the bluff of anybody.
Our opposition parties also need to borrow a leaf from the Democratic Alliance (DA) of South Africa. It is a competent opposition to the national government and control the Western Cape Province. The has won the best-run government in recent times and this award is given annually by the ANC government. That is political tolerance in action. The DA also serves as gadfly pestering the ANC government in any anti-people project or proposal. For example ,the e-toll issue and increase in electricity tariffs, amongst others. There are other opposition parties and each of them has its ideology and belief. I doubt, if such opposition parties exist in Nigeria. Little wonder, people cross back and forward and backward. I have seen a person that cross-carpet about five times to become a governor in Nigeria.
What value does your chapter intends to add to the parent APC?
First and foremost, there is no need to duplicate political parties, if we have the same ideology. The APC-SA and other diaspora bodies share the views of the APC mother body back home. We believe strongly in voters’ education. We know that an enlightened mind is a great weapon and such is needed to defend democracy. What I have found particularly interesting about South Africans is that even the very uneducated knows his/her political right and will do anything to defend it. We need to mobilise people to stand up for what they believe. Diaspora voting is another area that we are pushing for and I believe that the parties in Nigeria and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) are already working on its realisation. We will also be pushing strongly for internal democracy at all levels for our party in Nigeria. If a person is denied his right to be elected and he perceives it as unjust, he will carry the burden of being cheated and that is not good for a viable opposition. Everyone should be pushing the same goal of replacing the dysfunctional government. We want to see an APC that is a model to other parties in Nigeria.
What is your understanding of the philosophy, ideas and manifestos of the APC as the main opposition party?
Honestly, it should be understood that while the party philosophy should remain fairly the same, the ideas and manifestos will be constantly changing to meet the need of the people we are here to serve. I believe that the philosophy of the ACN is to provide a credible and viable alternative in good governance, which is serving the people and impacting directly on the lives of ordinary citizens of Nigeria. The ideas will be to create and sustain good governance, to maintain and improve on the current infrastructures, and to create and promote enabling environment for local and international businesses to thrive so that employment can be created for our people. The current manifesto focuses on quality and affordable education, enhanced, affordable and accessible health care system, social services for women, children, aged and the disable (Medically and Physically Challenged), infrastructural development, creation of enabling business environment for investors, encouragement of sustainable private-public partnership, unbundling and decentralisation of public water system.
What were the inherent pitfalls of the ACN, ANPP, and CPC, which should be avoided by the APC?
The pitfalls of the political parties in Nigeria are many. But I must quickly point out that you exclude the PDP in the list above. There is the absence of basic ideology, keeping promises to the electorate and internal democracy.The people-oriented programmes and sincerity of purpose are not there.There is so much corruption in our political space. Service delivery should be the focus and this will leave little money in the hands of those who want to be corrupt and somehow, they will leave this political space, if they cannot steal money meant for the public good.
How is your chapter tackling the challenges of harmonisation and membership registration?
On the question of harmonisation, it will be good to wait for directives from the mother body in Nigeria. Whatever the leadership of the party suggests will be followed by all state and diaspora chapters. We will await the directive because we believe strongly in the leadership of our party.
What is your assessment of the Jonathan Administration?
Unfortunately, I will be speaking from the position of an opposition and our politicians mostly try to make irrelevant salient and valid opinion from the opposing camp. The current administration possibly has its strong points, including less interference in the job of the INEC to conduct free and fair state elections, the privatisation of the energy sector, although I strongly suggest that this should be monitored critically as no man will build his house and leave the critical supplies totally at the hand of an outsider.
Corruption is not tackled at all and the leadership of the PDP in the National Assembly alluded to this fact. Although, the Finance Minister and the Coordinator of the Economy has rolled out many superb figures of our economic performance, the ordinary people continue to groan under the weight of a more unfriendly economy. Our economic gains should reach the poor and the unemployed.
Ahead of 2015 polls, what are the challenges that will confront the APC?
As previously mentioned, a strong ideology is a major challenge. We need to work on it and the value system, otherwise, the political hijackers will infest and invade the party and make a mess of the founding principles. Focus and direction are needed, ahead of 2015 general elections. We also need tolerant party leadership on issues of internal democracy, proper grassroots electorate education and careful selection of party representatives who have ideals in the different positions to be contested for between now and 2015.
Can APC dislodge the PDP in 2015?
It is very possible. Prior to the advent of the current democratic dispensation, the people wanted an alternative to the military rule. The PDP appeared to have the national spread at that time and it quickly arranged a national structure and hijacked the political space by stifling the other role players. Somehow, in Nigeria, the government at the central can coerce, intimidate, force and arm-twist the oppositions into subjection. In fact any surviving opposition in Nigeria needs to be given a thumbs-up. I believe that 2015 is the year of new things for Nigeria.
What are the condition for free and fair election in Nigeria ?
The umpires must be umbiased. Strict adherence to “checks and balances”. Utilisation of modern technologies to conduct and monitor election as was done in Ghana and Kenya recently. Electorate education. Stiff penalties for offenders in electoral malpractices and frauds. There should be no intimidation and the use of state apparatuses like the military and police.
A head of elections this year, South Africa’s main opposition party merged with a smaller group yesterday to jointly challenge the ruling party whose popularity, long burnished by its close links to Nelson Mandela, has eroded amid corruption scandals and other problems.
The presidential candidate of the new coalition is Mamphela Ramphele, a former anti-apartheid activist who was close to Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who was tortured and died in police custody in 1977. Ramphele, who was also a doctor, academic and World Bank executive, formed her own party last year but struggled to gain political momentum and said the merger with the larger Democratic Alliance was in the country’s best interests.
At a Cape Town announcement, Ramphele invoked the name of Mandela, the former prisoner under apartheid who became president in South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994 and died Dec. 5 at the age of 95. Some South Africans had questioned how his death would impact the country as political forces, dominated by the ruling African National Congress, seek to harness a national identity forged in the struggle against white rule while addressing increasing worries about the future.
President Jacob Zuma and the ANC, the liberation movement once led by Mandela, are the electoral front-runners but they have lost some support because of corruption, poverty, unemployment, police brutality and a lack of adequate government services. One analyst, however, warned that while some people are wavering in their support for the ANC, the party remains a potent force and any claim that the new opposition alliance is a political game-changer is overstated.
Some observers expect the ANC to win the election, but with a smaller majority. The opposition aims to make inroads in Gauteng, a populous province and business center that is home to the capital, Pretoria, and the country’s biggest city, Johannesburg.
Ramphele spoke alongside Helen Zille, the head of the Democratic Alliance and premier of the Western Cape, the only one of nine South African provinces not run by the ANC. Zille was a journalist on the now-defunct Rand Daily Mail at the time of Biko’s death, and played a lead role in uncovering the circumstances of his death despite denials of wrongdoing from officials in the white racist government.
Zille said “old political formations” in South African were becoming obsolete, and that her party includes apartheid-era liberals who opposed the repressive system at the time, former members of the current ruling party and people, including Ramphele, with a background in Biko’s Black Consciousness movement.
She described the upcoming general elections as the most contested since the end of apartheid. A date for the vote to be held this year has not been set.
In the age of television and instant mass communication, we ought perhaps to revise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quip and insist that every hero becomes a bore not merely at last but very soon, maybe after only two or three television interviews.
To do so, however, would be to reckon without the phenomenon that is Nelson Mandela.
If one week is a long time in politics as a British statesman once remarked, the six months that have passed since Mandela was released from prison and has been the focus of media attention constitute nothing less than an eternity in the murky world of international politics.
And yet, his stature has continued to grow, and his admirers to multiply. Everywhere he speaks, his message gains in urgency. He has been winning friends for the African National Congress and the liberation struggle of which he is the foremost symbol.
After scores of television appearances, innumerable newspaper interviews and speeches, he is still displaying an intriguing knack for saying the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way.
At 72, Mandela maintains a schedule that would have fazed many a man half his age. But rarely has he shown the irritability that usually flows from weariness that not even a person of his singular energies and willpower can conceal. To admirers and opponents alike, he has shown uncommon civility and a graciousness that is all the more remarkable for being so totally natural.
In America, the land of the anti-hero, where the news interview is an inquisition by another name, it was widely expected that he would be cut down to human size at last. He had set out on a14-nation, six-week trip only four days after undergoing surgery. The calculation in some quarters was that by the time he reached the United States, signs of exhaustion would be so manifest in his conduct, his temperament would have become brittle, and he would not be able to stand up to the tough questioning for which the American news media are reputed.
Mandela’s well-known favourable disposition towards some of the bêtes noires of the American Establishment – Cuba’s president Fidel Castro, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and PLO leader Yasser Arafat – was sure to render him vulnerable to the sniping of the jingoistic right-wing press and the powerful Jewish interests, of which the United States policy-making is hostage.
But in America, Mandela was at his brilliant and most engaging best. More than one million people in New York lined his route to honour him in a ticker-tape parade. The city’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, gave him the keys of the Big Apple. At the United Nations, accredited representatives of all nations of the world rose in a prolonged ovation even before he began to speak.
He told America that that its enemies were not necessarily the enemies of the ANC; he praised Castro and Gaddafi and Arafat for their contributions to the liberation struggle in South Africa. He spelled out without hatred or bitterness what apartheid means in human terms, insisted on the imperative of the armed struggle, and declared that nothing had happened in his country to warrant the lifting of sanctions.
In Washington, DC, he drew rapturous applause at various points in his address before the United States Congress, the first by a black foreign leader who holds no executive authority.
In television and newspaper interviews and speeches across the United States, he reiterated his position on various issues calmly and with the grave, measured dignity that is his hallmark.
Predictably, a few rumbles were heard here and there. The Jewish lobby was aghast that Mandela did not denounce Yasser Arafat as a terrorist chieftain and the PLO as a terrorist organisation. Under pressure from the large Cuban exile community, Miami scaled down the reception that had been planned for Mandela.
The New York Times in an editorial hailed him as an authentic hero, a manifestation of man’s unconquerable spirit, but remarked that if the United States were to employ Mandela’s standards and judge individuals and organisations by their attitudes toward it and not on the basis of other people’s prejudices, it would never have imposed economic sanctions against the South Africa.
A.M. Rosenthal, the rabidly pro-Jewish columnist for the paper, wrote approvingly of Mandela but deplored as “amoral” his standards in choosing friends. So did other Times columnist Flora Lewis, whose liberal credentials are unimpeachable on all matters except those that have any bearing on Israel, however tangentially.
All of them conveniently forget that the United States is only a recent convert to the view that economic sanctions can force Pretoria to reconsider its iniquitous policies’
Was it not the U.S. that invented the opportunistic and amoral policy of “constructive engagement”? Was it not former Secretary of State, George Schultz, who declared that the U.S. could not impose economic sanctions against South Africa because American women would by that measure be deprived of a source of diamonds? Had the U.S. not always stood in the way of UN draft resolutions condemning the barbarities of apartheid?
Mandela knows all this but is too gracious, too civil, to dwell on them. He had his own message to put across and was not going to be dragged into sterile controversy.
*Second installment of a three-part retrospective on Mandela. The article was first published in The African Guardian (September 23, 1990).
*
Twenty-three years later, well before Mandela’s lifeless body had turned cold, the right-wing media in the United States resumed its campaign of framing Mandela according to its soulless measure of goodness and greatness.
Yes, Mandela preached love and forgiveness and may even have practised same. But, you see, he was a Kha.mew.nist (read Communist). A Kha.mew.nist, you understand? He was the leader of a terrorist organisation that murdered thousands of innocent people in Africa and elsewhere, many of them women and children.
You doubt it?
Recently declassified material in the British archives, they said triumphantly, shows irrefutably that Mandela was not merely leader of an organisation of which the South African Communist Party was an ally, he was, horror of horrors, an actual, card-carrying, dues-paying member of that party.
Such labelling is a familiar weapon of the American Right, reserved especially for outstanding black men whose complaisance could not be taken for granted – Paul Robeson, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name just a few.
Mandela had denied his alleged Communist affiliation again and again. But does it matter whether he was a Communist or not? If it is indeed proven that he was once an active, card-carrying, dues-paying member of the SACP, would that take anything away from his stature as one of the greatest men of our age and any age?
Apartheid, the pernicious ideology that undergirded the machinery of government in South Africa, was justly condemned by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. To some of the loudest elements of the American Right, however, Communism is a far greater evil apartheid.
Better a crime against humanity – especially black humanity — than a doctrine that challenges the foundations of market capitalism.
The earth becons today to Nelson Rolihiahla Mandela, the legendary freedom fighter and former South African President who is due for burial in his village of Qunu.
The body arrived the village yesterday after nine days of nation-wide mourning.
He will be buried with state honours and traditional rites.
The military passed Mandela’s flag-draped casket to the ANC who in turn handed it to family elders from the abaThembu clan at the home that served as the former president’s rural retreat.
Scores of people had lined the road from nearby Mthatha to Qunu to see his cortege pass through the green countryside, many clutching flowers and flags, some perched in trees for a better view.
Mandela’s remains were flown to the Eastern Cape from Pretoria after a final tribute by the ANC at the Waterkloof Airforce Base to the man who symbolised its struggle against apartheid and led it to power in 1994.
President Jacob Zuma saluted Mandela’s commitment to a non-racial society and said his life’s work would never be forgotten, before shouting “Amandla” and breaking into song.
“Go well Tata… we will always remember you,” he said.
Zuma’s political woes have become plain in the wake of Mandela’s death — months before the next general elections — and the ANC is trying to contain the fallout after he was loudly booed before a large cast of world leaders at Tuesday’s official memorial in Soweto.
“We need more Madibas so that our country can prosper… Yes, we are free, but the challenge of inequality remains,” he told the audience of key ANC figures at Waterkloof, including former president Thabo Mbeki.
Mbeki, who was ousted by Zuma five years ago, made headlines a few days ago when he suggested the country needed better leadership.
Zuma in his eulogy pointedly said Mandela’s death was not the moment to settle political scores.
“We should not think that Madiba’s passing is a time for settling scores… it means you do not understand Madiba and you will never understand him, because he was a man of honesty.”
Mandela’s grandson, Mandla, thanked all of those who paid their respects in Pretoria and at dozens of emotion-laden ceremonies around the country in recent days.
“I have witnessed his army, I have witnessed his people, I have witnessed ordinary South Africans who walked this long walk to freedom with him and I can assure the African National Congress today that the future of this country looks bright.”
He sat beside Mandela’s body at the Union Buildings this week as 100 000 people came to view the freedom icon lying in state and accompanied it on the journey to Qunu in respect of Xhosa culture.
Speaking in the village, AmaHegebe chief Phathekile Holomisa explained that throughout the flight, an elder or senior male family member had to talk to the body and keep it informed of the journey’s progress.
The person would address Mandela as if he was still alive, Holomisa explained.
“This is so because his spirit lives,” he said.
Today’s funeral will attract some 4 000 mourners, a small number compared to the tens of thousands who filled most of Soweto’s FNB Stadium to hear US President Barack Obama lead tributes to Mandela.
The event became mired in controversy yesterday when archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu announced that he would not attend because he had not been invited.
“Much as I would have loved to attend the service to say a final farewell to someone I loved and treasured, it would have been disrespectful to Tata to gatecrash what was billed as a private family funeral,” he said in a statement.
Presidential spokesperson Mac Maharaj contradicted Tutu, giving assurances that the cleric — who had a long, close association with Mandela, but has lambasted the current government — was on the guest list.
The government communications service said Tutu should have called if he wanted to attend the funeral because no invites were sent out.
However, the archbishop did not call.
Tutu, who baptised South Africa the “Rainbow Nation”, declared in May that he would no longer vote for the ANC because of “the way things have gone”.
He had recently pleaded with Mandela’s family not to “besmirch” the icon’s name after some relatives became involved in a public spat over the Mandela burial site.
And in 2011, the outspoken Tutu blasted Zuma’s administration for being “worse than the apartheid government” after it failed to issue the Dalai Lama a visa to attend his 80th birthday — vowing to pray for its downfall.
Tutu also condemned the police “massacre” of 34 mineworkers in August last year.
Among the dignatories who will attend are Britain’s Prince Charles, African Union Commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and US civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Iranian vice president Mohammad Shariatmadari, Lesotho’s King Letsie III and former French prime ministers Lionel Jospin and Alain Juppe will also attend, but former US president Bill Clinton will not, after initially planning to be there.
Mandela will be laid to rest next to his father Mphakanyiswa Gadla Henry, his mother Noqaphi Nosekeni and his son Magkatho Lewanika Mandela.
The funeral will be an eclectic mix of traditional rituals of the Xhosa people to whom Mandela’s Thembu clan belongs,Christian elements and those of a state funeral.
In accordance with Xhosa tradition,an ox will be slaughtered and the deceased’s body wrapped in a leopard’s skin because of his status.
A family elder will be talking to the body’s spirit.
The arrival of an army of reporters, photographers and television crews for Nelson Mandela’s funeral today has created a security nightmare for South African authorities – and the chance to make a quick buck for enterprising locals.
Police and soldiers have sealed off the center of and banished media to a field on top of a hill a kilometer from the cemetery.
In accordance with the wishes of Mandela’s family to keep the ceremony private, the only pictures of the burial of one of the 20th century’s greatest figures will be via the SABC state broadcaster and an official outside photographer.
In the skies above the village, fighter jets are enforcing a no-fly zone, both for the security of imminent high profile arrivals such as Britain’s Prince Charles, and to prevent any prying eyes observing the rites from a passing helicopter.
A huge marquee erected on a hillside for mourning family members, tribal elders, top government figures and official guests blocks the view of nearly all of the family plot where three of Mandela’s children are already buried.
Nelson Mandela was a phenomenon, he created a rich legacy of written words and also inspired other artistes across the globe to compose songs, make films and staged concerts in his name. Edozie Udeze takes a look at Madiba’s influence on the written words
APART from his natural love for the art and the humanities, Nelson Mandela is known to have attracted and inspired myriad of concerts, songs, poems, stage dramas, fictional stories, movies, folklores and public readings.
But more than that, when the story of apartheid was first made public in 1946, by Peter Abrahams in his epic novel entitled Mine Boy the world was shocked to know that heinous colour and racial issues were taking place in South Africa. It was partly the sentiments expressed in that book and the uproar it generated in global political arena that inspired The African National Congress (ANC) to go global with some of its political antics and tactics.
Mandela knew the intrinsic power of literature and how it can be used for propaganda and political maneuvering. By the time The Path of Thunder by the same Peter Abrahams was published in 1948, Mandela and most top shots of the ANC had seen in some of the literary materials protest weapons for the liberation of the Black peoples of South Africa. Even before then, Mandela was known to have fallen in love with tribal and heroic stories of his people.
The story of Mfecane, Shaka the Zulu, the folkloric escapades of his tribal leaders, all excited him beyond comparison. Thereafter, he immediately took to heart some of the remarkable protests led by his warrior native leaders. The words of Peter Abrahams in Mime Boy which says ‘But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth. When two strong men stand face to face/though they come from the ends of the earth”, predicted the era of political struggle which was to give impetus to the likes of Mandela.
During his trial in Pretoria in 1962, Mandela found a great ally in Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer who later became a Nobel Laureate whom he made to edit all his speeches. Gordimer, a white South African, abhorred by members of the all-white ruling National Party found peace and solace in being close to Mandela. Mandela loved her style of writing, her sentiment about the perilous moments then. In an interview, she affirmed also that the life of Mandela helped to influence her writings, her tenacity of purpose.
After the 1964 trial upon which Mandela was given a life sentence, Gordimer made friends with Mandela’s attorney. In the end, she wrote a book based on that episode. The book, Burger’s Daughter, a copy of which was smuggled to him in his prison, touched Mandela so profoundly that he forever found a formidable confidant in Gordimer. In later years, Gordimer, looked back and reflected thus: “He (Mandela) the most exigent reader I could have hoped for, wrote me a letter of deep understanding and acceptance about the book.”
This was why also another book centering on the black leadership of the country entitled The Late Bourgeois by Gordimer was banned by the apartheid regime in 1976. They saw in her works powerful tools to aid ANC and the struggle.
Breaking the prison walls
All along, Mandela ensured that he kept a diary. Part of the texts he smuggled out to the world helped to fight his cause. He believed so much in the powers of literature, in the moving words of great writers. After reading a copy of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Mandela exclaimed: “This is one author under whose hands the prison walls fell.” This was an instructive statement that made him a literary giant himself; someone who never allowed any important moment in his life to pass him by.
In Long Walk to Freedom, an autobiography, he recounts the details of his life as a child in Cape Province. He also talks about his university education and rise to presidential leadership through his fight against apartheid. He also gives minute-by-minute account of his years in different prisons in the country. As you read through the book, you could feel the moving prose style of someone who is in love with literature, with his environment and people.
A voracious and conscientious reader, he was noted for his penchant for great authors. This was what he brought to bear on his second book The Struggle is my Life. It is a collection that chronicles his speeches and writings from 1944 to 1990. In it, the Madiba recalls, with nostalgia the great statement he made in 1964 that the “struggle is my life and it is a struggle for which I am prepared to fight and die for the sake of the freedom of my people.” His prose nuances and style of muse show a man who mastered the art of story-telling using political imageries. There are usually deep folkloric undertones in his words.
In His Own Words, a collection published in 2004, in which both Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan wrote the Foreword, the world was able to have a glimpse of his thoughts. The most striking ones were the ones he made when he received his Nobel Peace and while in office as first Black South African president. He used his writings and powerful speeches to reach the hearts of his people, arousing in them the strength and zeal to continue to stand for what is right and just.
Again in 1987, Gordimer wrote a very powerful prophetic novel appropriately titled A Sport of Nature. There she predicted the end of apartheid and included a liberation leader based on Mandela. That book was not given much attention because the apartheid regime thought her prediction silly.
At that time too when all hope was almost lost, a South African poet called John Matshikiza wrote: ‘And I watch it in Mandela’, saying that this man would end up a national hero. Also a Nigerian poet, Jekwu Ikeme whose poem ‘When Mandela goes’, published in 2004, dwelt on the state of South Africa when the great man bowed to mortality. Then, would South Africa be hollow, deprived and forlorn without the Madiba? Part of what Ikeme wrote goes thus: ‘when you go Madiba, your nobility shall be our lasting inheritance/this land you so loved shall continue to love/we shall trail long and majestic walk/your gallant work shall be our cross and shepherd.’
The list of writers who were inspired by Mandela and the barbarity of apartheid are legion. Among these are eminent ones such as Wole Soyinka and JP Clark-Bekederemo who both published collection of poems dedicated to him. Soyinka titled his collection Mandela and other Earths while Clark-Bekederemo csimply titled his own Madela. Toni Morrison, also a Nobel laureate once said of Mandela, “He is for me, the single statesman in the world. In that literal sense, someone who is not solving all his problems with guns. He’s truly believable.”
There are also many South African writers whose works touched on apartheid and Mandela even if indirectly. These include Athol Fugard, J.M. Coetzee, Alan Paton, Andre Blink, Alex La Guma, Lewis Nkosi and a host of others.
Mandela may be gone in body but his spirit lives in the corpus of literature that he has inspired.
United States President Barack Obama led world tributes yesterday to Nelson Mandela, hailing him as “a giant of history” at a rain-soaked memorial attended by tens of thousands of South Africans united in proud, noisy celebration.
Obama was one of close to 100 world leaders at the event in Soweto’s World Cup stadium, where songs of praise and revolution, many harking back to the apartheid era that Mandela helped condemn to history, echoed down from the dancing crowds in the stands.
“It is hard to eulogise any man … how much harder to do so for a giant of history, who moved a nation towards justice,” Obama said, after being introduced to wild cheers.
“He was not a bust made of marble, he was a man of flesh and blood,” Obama said of the prisoner-turned-president whose life story earned uncommon universal respect.
The four-hour event began at midday (1000 GMT) with a stirring rendition of the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa), led by a mass choir and picked up with enthusiasm by the rest of the stadium.
Some 80,000 had been expected, but the venue was two-thirds full as the ceremony got underway under a curtain of rain that had been falling since the early morning.
Despite the profound sense of national sorrow triggered by Mandela’s death last Thursday, the mood was upbeat, with people determined to celebrate the memory of one of the 20th century’s towering political figures.
“His long walk is over, he can finally rest,” African National Congress (ANC) Vice President Cyril Ramaphosa said in an opening address.
On several occasions, Ramaphosa felt forced to admonish boisterous sections of the crowd for chanting during the speeches.
In his tribute, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon noted that Mandela had managed to unite people in death, much as he had in life.
“Look around this stage … we see leaders representing many points of view … all here, all united,” he said.
Before taking to the stage, Obama shook hands with Raul Castro, leader of long-time Cold War rival Cuba.
The handshake was seen by millions watching the memorial being broadcast live around the world, and comes as Obama tries to make good on his vow to reach out even to the most implacable of US foes.
Crowds had begun gathering at the Soweto stadium before daybreak and, as the gates opened, they swarmed inside the venue where Mandela made his last major public appearance at the 2010 World Cup final.
Wrapped in the South African flag or yellow-green coloured shawls printed with the slogan “Mandela Forever”, they danced and sang — oblivious to the constant drizzle.
“He’s God given, he’s God taken. We will never stop to cherish him,” said Shahim Ismail, who took a day off from the sports academy he runs in Johannesburg to attend the event.
“This is once in your life. This is history,” said Noma Kova, 36. “I didn’t want to watch this on TV.”
Mandela’s widow, Graca Machel, received a huge ovation as she took her seat on the main stage constructed at one end of the pitch.
News of Mandela’s death at his home in Johannesburg resonated around the world, triggering a wave of loving admiration from political and religious leaders, some of whom agree on little else.
In a nod to Mandela’s extraordinary global reach, popularity and influence, the Indian, Brazilian and Namibian presidents, as well as Castro and the vice president of China all delivered eulogies.
Obama took a swipe at authoritarian leaders who spoke of embracing Mandela’s legacy without acting upon it.
“There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people,” he said,
The memorial event was part of an extended state funeral that will culminate in Mandela’s burial on Sunday in the rural village of Qunu where he spent his early childhood.
South African President Jacob Zuma, who was roundly booed by sections of the crowd in a reflection of growing public dissatisfaction with the current generation of ANC leaders, hailed Mandela as “fearless freedom fighter”.
“In his honour, we commit ourselves to continue building a nation based on democratic values, of human dignity and democracy,” Zuma said.
Although Mandela had been critically ill for months, the announcement of his death was a body blow for this recently reborn nation.
He had been out of public life for more than a decade, but South Africans looked to his unassailable moral authority as a comforting constant in a time of uncertain social and economic change.
Ahead of the burial in Qunu, Mandela’s body will lie in state for three days from Wednesday in the amphitheatre of the Union Buildings in Pretoria where he was sworn in as president in 1994.
Each morning, his coffin will be borne through the streets of the capital in a funeral cortege.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Francois Hollande and Afghan President Hamid Karzai were among the leaders attending the memorial ceremony.
“We were told it was appropriate to wear a black tie,” Cameron said after arriving at the stadium in Soweto.
“But when you come and you hear this great noise and this great atmosphere of celebration, it is clear that people here in South Africa want to, yes, say goodbye to this great man, yes commemorate what he did, but also celebrate his life and celebrate his legacy,” he said.
Singer-activist Bono and South African actress Charlize Theron were among the celebrity mourners.
The name his father gave him at birth, he said in his engaging and inspiring 1995 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, was Rolihlahla. In Xhosa, his native language, he said, the word literally meant “pulling the branch of a tree” but its colloquial meaning more accurately was “trouble maker”.
“I do not believe,” he said of this name in the opening paragraphs of his book, “that names are destiny or that my father somehow divined my future, but in later years friends and relatives would ascribe to my birth name storms I have both caused and weathered.”
Names may not be destiny and his father may not have divined his future by naming him Rolihlahla at birth, but Nelson Mandela, aka Madiba, who died at 95 last Thursday, December 5, could not have been given a more apt but, at the same time, a more self-contradictory nickname; in the eyes of those who invented and perpetrated apartheid as one of the world’s most obnoxious and heinous ideologies, the man was probably their worst nightmare but in the eyes of the rest of the world he was certainly one of its greatest TROUBLESHOOTERS of all time. For, all his adult life he fought more than most leaders in the world – and paid a higher price – for the dignity and humanity of all men regardless of colour, creed, nationality or gender.
Mandela, at any rate, seemed an unlikely trouble maker growing up in Mveso countryside in Qunu district of the Transkei where he was born on July 8, 1918. “All I wanted as a child of 9 (the year he lost his royal father and had to move out of the village),” he said in his book, “was to be a champion stick fighter.” However, the indignities he suffered and which he saw all around him growing up under the system of apartheid, simply because he was black, left him with no choice but to forget the “luxury” of his literal stick fighting and champion the much more difficult fight against not just racism but any form of discrimination.
As the world testified to yesterday when over a hundred dignitaries, celebrities and world leaders, including American President Barack Obama and our own, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, and thousands of ordinary folks gathered at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg, in defiance of heavy rains, to pay him their last respect, the man proved himself the greatest champion of the fight against apartheid. And he did so not with modern day “fighting stick”, or the gun, if you will, but primarily through eschewing bigotry, hatred and reverse racism.
The walk to freedom for all races in South Africa was indeed a long one and, of course, it began long before Mandela was born. In its most popular modern day manifestation as the African National Congress, however, the walk to freedom for all in his country begun in 1912, six years before he was born. Its key objective when it was founded on January 12 that year was the creation of a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South African society.
Soon enough the younger elements in the organisation led by Anton Lembede, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and himself, among others, felt the organisation was not militant and mass-oriented enough and consequently in 1944 they formed its Youth League.
Four years after that, apartheid, which until then was only de facto government policy became official, following the defeat of the ruling Unity Party of mostly British whites by the National Party of the Boer settlers widely known as Afrikaans.
Predictably, the NP proceeded post-haste to enact all manner of obnoxious and racist laws which restricted the movements of blacks who formed nearly 80% of the population, of Indians (3%) and of so-called Coloured, i.e. those of mixed races, (8%) and also restricted where they could live, work, play and worship and do whatever. These obnoxious laws climaxed in the Bantustan policy in1959, a policy which gave whites who constituted fewer than 10% of South Africa’s population nearly 90% of the land!
Predictably, the ANC rejected these laws and organised peaceful protests against them. The racist government responded with both force and the law. In 1956, it charged Mandela, along with 155 other members – 105 Africans, 21 Indians, 23 whites and seven Coloured – with treason. The trial proper began three years later and lasted for about two years. Meantime, the government imposed a ban on the movement and public speaking of several of the organisation’s leaders, including, of course, Mandela.
On March 21 1961, two days before the court was to deliver its verdict on the treason trial, a massacre by the South African police took place in Sharpeville, a small township 56 kilometres south of Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital, in which 69 unarmed Africans were killed, many of them shot in the back as they fled from the scene of the demonstration they had gathered for. Government then declared a state of emergency and subsequently banned the ANC.
The whole world was horrified by the massacre. On its part, the ANC now felt obliged to drop its peaceful resistance. It formed an armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), with Mandela as its first leader and Chris Hani as its commander, and took up arms in 1961. Not even the dismissal by the courts of the case against the defendants following a week’s delay occasioned by the Sharpeville massacre could persuade Mandela and his fellow comrades that the racists had become open to reason.
The ANC knew their acquittal was only a temporary relief. Soon enough it was proved right when 19 of its leaders, including Mandela, were detained and subsequently charged for sabotage and attempt to overthrow the government in what became known as the Rivonia Trial between 1963 and 1964.
The majority of them were convicted and sentenced to live at the end of the trial. Mandela served 27 years of his sentence, the first 18 of them in solitary confinement on the forbidding Roben Island, off the South African coast, before he was released on February 11, 1990.
That release was perhaps the most symbolic moment in the long fight against apartheid. It is hard, if not impossible, to articulate that moment more graphically and more coherently than President Bill Clinton did in his 2004 autobiography, My Life. On that day, he said, he “witnessed the ultimate testimonial in human endurance.” He, his wife, Hillary, and their daughter, Chelsea, whom they had pulled out of bed especially for that moment, he said, watched Mandela on television “take the last step of his long walk to freedom.” Mandela, Clinton said, “had endured and triumphed, to end apartheid, liberate his own mind and heart from hatred and inspire the world.”
In Mandela’s own words, he walked out of his prison that day with bitterness and malice to none. “The oppressor and the oppressed alike,” he said in his book, “are robbed of their humanity. When I walked out of the prison that was my mission, to liberate the oppressor and the oppressed both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that this is not the case. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”
Mandela’s legacy, however, was not only of the need to love even thy enemy. He also left a legacy of knowing when to let go of power as the first black president of South Africa when he promised in 1994 to serve for only one tem and kept his word. He also left behind a legacy of living a simple life, in and out of power, which shunned primitive accumulation of wealth. You can hardly say the same of many leaders, in and out of power today, who have been falling over themselves in singing praises for the man.
When his friend and comrade in the struggle against apartheid, Oliver Tambo, died in April 1993, he had this to say of Tambo: “In Plato’s allegory of the metals, the philosopher classifies men into groups of gold, silver and lead. Oliver was pure gold.”
Borrowing from his tribute to his friend, it would be an understatement to say Mandela was Platinum, with a capital P.
Feedback
Last week’s column on what I said was the persecution of Governor Sule Lamido by President Goodluck Jonathan received a 1,200-word rejoinder from EFCC, a couple of emails one of which I will publish next week, God willing, for the power of its logic, and 38 texts, mostly critical of my piece. I have since forwarded the EFCC reaction to the editors of this newspaper for publication for my lack of space. Below are a few of the texts.
Sir,
How much did Lamido pay you to publish this back-page foolishness you call an article? You deftly and deliberately ignored the real issue: did Lamido’s sons steal?
+2348096571185
Sir,
Are you saying Lamido’s sons were not caught in the act or that they should be left off the hook simply because their father is a performing governor? Be objective for once.
+2348033553191
Sir,
Governor Lamido was/is my man on performance. However, I won’t support indiscipline, corruption and law-breaking by any family member or governor. Journalists, cleanse our society.
+2347064181043
Only irredeemable fools and born cowards call the prosecution of politicians who use their children as conduit pipe to siphon public funds persecution. I urge Mr. President to fight corruption without fear and favour.
+2348076823815
Sir,
Instead of condemning Lamido for the ‘alleged’ looting of d state treasury through his children, you would rather be contented comparing who loots more than the other in the country. And, of course, in your own brand of patriotism a Nigerian governor or leader who performs better than his predecessor in office should be free to help himself with the state money. Very unfortunate.
+2348037921541
Sir,
Imagine this scenario. Tinubu’s son or Murtala Nyako’s daughter commits an offence and the government must look the other way so as not to be accused of selective fight. Warped logic! Why hasn’t the govt picked any of Buhari’s relations for crimes? Let’s stop this elite nepotism. A thief is a thief, whether he steals N184b or N10b.
+2348037055027
Where were you on February 11, 1990? I mean where were you the day the world’s best known political prisoner and anti-apartheid activist Dr Nelson Mandela was released from prison by the then racist regime in South Africa?
It was a wet day in Lagos, one of those weekend days I think, and I was at a hotel lobby that mid morning with other reporters on assignment when the news break came: Nelson Madela, leader of banned African National Congress (ANC) has been released from prison on the orders of South African president Frederick Willem de Klerk. The government also unbanned the ANC setting the stage for the total dismantling of white supremacist rule in South Africa for majority rule four years later.
Struggle against apartheid for which Mandela dedicated 67 of his 95 years on earth, 27 of which were spent in jail was about to end and South Africa, finally about to be free.
The news wasn’t totally unexpected; it had been in the air for some time that the white only regime in South Africa was thinking of abolishing apartheid and allowing the black majority to participate fully in the affairs of their country. But even after the announcement, it still sounded unbelievable. So Mandela would be released and we’ll see him flesh and blood?
I remember the then African Concord magazine was running a cartoon competition asking readers to draw a sketch of how Mandela was likely to look like after 27 years in prison. Such was the expectation and frenzy in the media in Nigeria as elsewhere around the world that we all feasted on the news of his release.
And when Tata Madiba as he was fondly called passed on, December 5 2013 at his home in Johannesburg, the whole world rose in unison to mourn and celebrate a rare human being with a soft heart even for his enemies.
As Mandela begins his final journey home today recalling all the achievements and the good works he’s left behind would be enormous, but watching the internecine war going on in the Central African Republic reminds one of one of Mandela’s greatest contributions to African unity; restoring place and unity to the warring Burundi. If he could look back Madiba would feel bad that the Central African Republic and indeed the whole of that region in Africa, including the Great Lakes Region, which also includes Burundi, are in turmoil again.
Since President Francois Bozize was ousted in March by a rebel alliance-Seleka, led by Michel Djotodia, CAR has known no peace as rival ethnic militias fight for control of this landlocked country of just 4.6 million people. With about 3,500 child soldiers in their rank, the rebels have been particularly ferocious in the last few days killing no fewer than 394 people just as the war has taken a sectarian dimension. The pro Djotodia group, mainly drawn from among Muslims now pitted against a mainly Christian militia have virtually divided capital Bangui into two sections, reminiscent of the sectarian divide that tore Lebanon apart in the past and still threatening the unity of the Arab country.
There are 2,500 African Peacekeepers in CAR backed by 1,600 French soldiers all trying to restore peace to the country. And according to the United Nations, no fewer than 9,000 Peacekeepers would be required to bring the chaos in CAR which has led to about 10 per cent of the population already displaced under control.
Now what are African leaders doing in this respect and what efforts are they making to prevent all these avoidable conflicts and blood lettings in the continent? In particular, what would Mandela have recommended if he were to be alive and able to intervene in the CAR internecine war?
While we may never know this, Mandela, wherever he is today would most likely applaud the decision to set up a permanent Stand-By Peacekeeping Force for Africa to intervene and restore peace to troubled countries in the continent and most importantly nip in the bud any simmering crisis likely to blow into armed conflict.
At a Paris summit on Peace and Security in Africa last week, the decision to put in place a wholly African Peace Keeping Force not later than 2015, marked a shift from the reluctance of African leaders in the past to intervene in the internal affairs of another (African) country, even when and where such happenings are likely to have serious consequences for neighbouring countries or an entire region.
The principle of non-interference which was included in the charter of the defunct Organisation of African Unity (OAU) by its founding fathers was largely seen by critics as a way of protecting and keeping unpopular regimes in power across the continent. The experience of the Liberian civil war that nearly destabilised the whole of the West African sub region in the 1990s was to change the position of most African leaders away from protecting tyrants to acting in the best interest of the people of the country in question.
Were it not for Nigeria and a few ECOWAS member states that braved the challenge and constituted a wholly West African peace keeping force known by its acronym ECOMOG, Charles Taylor and his band of rebels would have plunged an entire sub region of over 200 million nationals of 15 different countries into turmoil. I think the African Union, the African Old Boys club that replaced the OAU must have learnt a lot from the Liberian experience, enough for it to back this new initiative of a permanent African Peace Keeping Force.
According to Nigeria’s president Dr Goodluck Jonathan who was part of the Paris summit, the proposed force “can mobilize quickly whenever we have challenges and there is the need to deploy them…when you have this stand-by force, they now have an operational order covering the whole of Africa. Anywhere there is conflict, it will not require UN resolution, but a host country’s invitation and an endorsement by AU.”
This is laudable if it can be carried through and the support of France in particular is also commendable. The French rightly or wrongly have been accused of backing these tyrannical and often despotic regimes in Africa in the past for selfish reasons. French troops stationed in most French speaking African countries have been used in the past by Paris to put down any popular revolt against these unpopular regimes. But the economic and political burden of carrying these countries on her back now appears to be too much for France, hence the resort to backing a permanent African High Command to take care of conflicts on the continent. .
But good as this stand-by force idea is, having to rely on invitation by the host (troubled) country before peace keepers can be sent in to intervene could leave the force impotent as these leaders would naturally not support such intervention and never issue an invitation for such even if their countries are bleeding. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Laurent Gbagbo’s Cote d’Ivoire are good examples here. So African leaders must find a way of going above such despotic leaders if the need ever arose to send in peace-keepers and restore peace in such countries. This will make Nelson Mandela happy in his grave satified that Africa is finally taking her destiny in her hands.
Good night Tata Madiba. We will never forget you.