Ramaphosa’s biggest task will be to revive and implement Mandela’s vision and ideals

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. His biggest task will be to revive and implement Nelson Mandela’s vision and ideals. AFP PHOTO  

In Summary

• Viewing South Africa today against Mandela’s post-apartheid vision, one can be forgiven for imputing criminal negligence on the part of the leadership that came after Mandela.

By TEE NGUGI
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On the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 from prison, American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson made a comment that was not only memorable but which also captured the meaning for Africa of Mandela’s journey.

He postulated that Mandela’s journey was a paradigm of renewal for Africa. At the time, every historian and commentator was searching for words, phrases, digging deep into their conscience, in order to understand and describe the meaning of the spectacular odyssey. Only Jackson captured both the Herculean moral crusade and its meaning for Africa.

Mandela in his book, Long Walk to Freedom, gives practical sense to Jackson’s philosophy. At the end of the book, he describes the much harder, more protracted struggle that comes with attainment of freedom.

He writes: “I have walked that long road to freedom… But I have discovered that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb… I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”

The confluence of Jackson’s assertion and Mandela’s post-apartheid vision is that, if the goals of equity and development are to be achieved, South Africa and Africa would have to undertake another journey as principled, as consistent, as arduous and as spectacular as the one Mandela himself had undertaken.

It is instructive that both Mandela and Jackson do not articulate nationalist post-colonial ideologies that have formed the basis of much of Africa’s ideological and intellectual expression over the past half century. Their ideas, even after attainment of freedom, remain subversive and restless, advocating constant reinvention of the individual and nation.

Devotion to freedom

By contrast to nationalists like Kwame Nkrumah or Jomo Kenyatta, Mandela does not view traditional culture as an ideal to aspire to recreate. Rather, he intends to use the resources of modernity to recreate an ever more equitable and just society.

Thus, in the same book, he writes: “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”

Like Mandela, Malaysia’s Lee Kuan Yew also understood the arduous struggle of the post-colonial period. He writes that, after the Independence struggle, the gigantic task was to change the people’s mentality from “breaking to building.”

He led his nation into this new battle with steely resoluteness, demanding the greatest effort from himself and from those who worked in his government and from the general population. There would be no nostalgic poetry about the pre-colonial past, there would be no excuses, laxity would not be tolerated, and corruption would be severely punished.

Lee Kuan Yew achieved a journey as spectacular as Mandela’s by dragging his impoverished shipyard of a country into one of the most developed in the world within a single generation.

Viewing South Africa today against Mandela’s post-apartheid vision and Jackson’s philosophical insight, one can be forgiven for imputing criminal negligence on the part of the leadership that came after Mandela.

Thabo Mbeki had the intellectual and ideological clarity to deliver on Mandela’s vision and Jackson’s philosophy. In his collection of speeches, Africa: The Time Has Come, Mbeki espouses radical post-colonial ideas. He laments the opportunities lost in Africa because of a fascination with an impotent and false nationalism.

As president, however, Mbeki seemed trapped in nationalist lyricism. His economic and social policies were at best chaotic. His regional policies lent support to the very same impotent nationalism he had so roundly condemned in his earlier life.

The less said of Jacob Zuma the better, suffice it to say that he was the most intellectually, ideologically and morally unqualified man to be president. His ouster some days ago will hopefully halt a shameful trajectory; the country was beginning to resemble your stereotypical African state — corrupt, whimsical social and economic policies, laxity in the civil service, foreign policy based on impotent nationalism.

Mandela’s and Jackson’s visions for South Africa and Africa were looking further and further away with each passing year.

Cyril Ramaphosa’s most critical task will be to fashion a post-apartheid national ethos. Hopefully, he will see that cultural fetishism as advocated by Zuma is as impotent and dangerous as the false nationalism of Mugabe or other dictators in Africa.

Can he recapture the great optimism in the wake of Mandela’s release that anything was possible? Can Ramaphosa set South Africa and Africa back on the trajectory of realising Mandela’s and Jackson’s visions?