By John Kamau

When he stepped down as South Africa’s first black president in 1999, Nelson Mandela baffled many world leaders who, had they been in his position, would have preferred to cling on — perhaps for life.

By quitting after just one term of five years, Mandela surprised even his former jailors, who coalesced around the now faded National Party (NP), and many wondered what a "New South Africa", as it was touted, would be without Mandela.

There was a good reason for that worry for Mandela had given a new lease of life to the Rainbow Nation and a chance to forgive and forget.

No man, he would tell his critics, had suffered more than he did during his 27 years in jail. Mandela has critics who do not think that he is the one who holds South Africa together. Allister Sparks, South Africa’s veteran commentator and the author of Beyond the Miracle, a book on post-apartheid South Africa puts it candidly: "To portray Mandela as the last pillar protecting us from catastrophe is absurd.

People have been making doomsday scenarios about South Africa all my life and I’m sick of them."

But Mandela has had no equal and still towers over the politics of South Africa like a colossus, long after he quit office. Still humble despite the accolades he has received (see separate story), Mandela is usually surprised by the kind of reception he gets.

"When I see the support that I get in cities I visit, I do not know what I have done to deserve this merit… All I can say is that this is not a tribute to an individual, it is a tribute to a country," he once said in Toronto.

As President, Mandela was much more concerned with the weakening Rand and some of his critics accused the Western press of failing to report on the real situation in South Africa.

But there are those who do not blame Mandela for failing the revolution.

In his book Against Global Apartheid, South Africa scholar Patrick Bond claims that enormous pressure was put on the ANC leadership to prove that it could govern with "sound macroeconomic policies".

"It became clear that if Mr Mandela tried genuine redistribution of wealth, the international markets would punish South Africa.

"Many within the party understandably feared that an economic meltdown would be used as an indictment not just of the ANC but of black rule itself," he wrote.

Caught in this dilemma, the ANC abandoned its policy of growth through redistribution and later on, under President Thabo Mbeki, adopted an IMF programme that included mass privatisations that saw the creation of a new black elite but led to mass layoffs and wage cuts in the public sector.

Indeed as late as July this year, as the G8 Summit prepared to open at Gleneagles, Scotland, we all listened to South African activist and former municipal councillor Trevor Ngwane — a key critic of Mandela’s — allege that Mandela had sold the South African revolution to Western capitalistic interests.

The discussion, hosted by the "War on Want - Make G8 History" campaigners, centred on privatisation and the big lie that was Tony Blair’s Commission on Africa report.

Ngwane, the chairman of the Soweto Anti-Privatisation Forum, took on Nelson Mandela — who was absent — and the African National Congress.

Given the aura that surrounds Mandela, only a few people have the courage to say that apartheid is not dead in South Africa and to blame it on political leadership starting with Mandela.

"Apartheid based on race has been replaced with apartheid based on class," Ngwane bellowed into the microphone. He has been taking on the new Rainbow nation via his Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee.

"When they disconnect electricity and water because of non-payments we reconnect them", he says.

Activists claim that they do it in the name of Nelson Mandela, who promised them access to basic services such as electricity and water.

"The ANC taught us these tactics," Ngwane once said after he was arrested and jailed for two weeks for leading a demonstration in 2002 against Johannesburg’s mayor, Amos Masondo.

Has the Mandela magic failed in post-apartheid South Africa? Internationally he remains an enigma and is still respected and controversial. Mandela has not even spared US President George Bush from criticism.

"Bush is now undermining the United Nations," Mandela told the International Women’s Forum after Bush started the Iraqi War. At that time Mandela said he would support action against Iraq’s former President Saddam Hussein only if the UN orders it.

"What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust."

Years later Mandela has been proved right and America is knee deep in a quagmire in Iraq as it fights an old enemy — the Al Qaeda — in a foreign country.

Unlike South Africans who can take on Mandela, world leaders shy from engaging him in any controversy.

On this occasion, spin-doctors in Washington were forced to respond with humility. White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer said: "Nelson Mandela was a great leader.

He remains a great man. [Bush] expresses his gratitude to the many leaders… who obviously feel differently than Mandela. He understands there are going to be people who are more comfortable doing nothing about a growing menace that could turn into a holocaust."

Even when Mandela twisted the knife by saying that all that Bush was after was Iraqi oil, Washington remained silent.

On Tony Blair he said: "He is the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer prime minister of Britain."

Article was originally published in The East African Standard
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