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Joram Nyathi Group Political Editor
ROHIHLAHLA Mandela is gone. He was a colossus in life as he was in death. His greatness however, continues to divide opinion in death as it did in life. While the “ideal” for which he was prepared to die was to see harmonious relations across the colour bar and a fair sharing of resources between the people of Orlando West and those of Houghton, it is evident that white capital made sure he was fully contained well before his release from prison on February 11, 1990.
By the time Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994 the radical agenda of the Freedom Charter had been reduced to platitudes around freedom, democracy, human rights – all of them mere form without content.
When he quit office after serving only one term without upsetting the proverbial apple cart, capitalist corporations anointed Mandela a saint whose model leadership should a be yardstick for everyone who did not want to be labelled a despot or dictator. President Mugabe across the border became a useful foil while Mandela was ensconced in power as both white capital’s mascot and its guardian angel.
A majority blacks were to remain in their proper place in this parasitic racial harmony, save for a few symbolic faces riding precariously on GEAR’s slippery escalator.
Research has just shown that while Mandela and the ANC rescued the South African economy from the brink, and that economy has been on a sustained growth path, the disparity between the rich and the poor has widened. The income gap between blacks and whites is a global scandal. Those who glorify him made sure Mandela was insulated from it all.
The convenient alibi for this scandal, in South Africa as in Zimbabwe, is to blame the poverty, crime, unemployment and lack of opportunities on peculiarly African phenomena called mismanagement and corruption.
This way you set blacks against each other while the real robbers who won’t share natural resources such as land, mines, banks and industry reap the dividend.
What some of us find insulting is the impression being created that Mandela would have set as his ideal and dream to retain the economic status quo.
Why would he want to die to create an unequal society which was already there?
Why would Mandela and fellow comrades want to spend nearly a decade on Robben Island to preserve white privileges which already had concrete form by way of apartheid?
We find it also interesting that Mandela was first declared a terrorist in the early 1960s when he decided the apartheid system and white rule could not be defeated in any other way except violence.
Democratic America kept him as a terrorist until 2008. In the same breath Mandela was being feted in all European capitals as an icon who fought to end the iniquitous system of apartheid.
At what point did the terrorist transform to a hero over the same cause? Would Mandela have been lionised in Europe and America if he had followed through the ideals of the ANC’s Freedom Charter to nationalise the economy? Brood of vipers!
We may not be too far off the mark to state that we are mourning different Mandelas side by side with those democrats and human rights defenders who called him a terrorist and made sure he was neutralised before leaving Robben Island.
In fact that appears to have been a precondition for the release!
Some of us are mourning Mandela’s wasted years in prison which left him a broken man.
We are mourning the missed opportunities for poor South Africans which his moral stature and charisma could have opened.
We are not saying he should have done everything; his failure even to try to implement a single radical policy in the Freedom Charter has served to cripple even the most valiant efforts of lesser mortals after him.
There is not much to be expected from President Jacob Zuma who seems to believe that young Julius Malema today, like Mandela in the 1960s, is a terrorist who should not be allowed to radicalise the ANC.
Instead he is busy dividing the vote in favour of Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance party.
Western corporations on the other hand are mourning a bleak sunset, an unpredictable dawn tomorrow.
Their shield has been taken away.
The illusion of the so-called rainbow nation which Mandela’s moral force sustained might just begin to unravel for the monumental fraud it has proved to be in the past 20 years.
And no one so far appears to have the moral stature to restrain the poor should they decide they now want to implement the Freedom Charter in honour of Mandela.
Our media, even here in Zimbabwe, have been very timid.
Or too mesmerised by the dominant Western media to find their own voice in the adulterated discourse around Mandela’s legacy.
As a result their focus has been on petty comparisons between Mandela and Mugabe – who between them is a darling of the West, why did Mugabe send his condolences “late”, whose funeral will attract more world leaders?
The answers were predetermined. Those who stay long in power and challenge Western economic hegemony can’t have “world leaders” at their funerals.
They have lapped up Western corporate interests’ contaminated phlegm as the juicy largesse that Mandela bequeathed to South Africa without given thought to the echoes of Marikana, the slum dwellers in Soweto and all those who have searched in vain for the colour black on the rainbow as Mandela’s sun set.
Online Reporter