Saying good-bye to Madiba

Do individuals matter in history? Inevitably the media magnifies the role of the individual and myths arise concerning certain public figures. Mandela was not the one-man author of the country’s liberation – although he never claimed to be. The black working class majority and its allies of all peoples, have only themselves and  their own collective solidarity to thank. For every Mandela, there were a dozen nameless heroes in the townships.

There exists an unquestioning belief in Mandela's  saintliness. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were also esteemed in a similar fashion.  Mandela spent 27 years in prison and was released in 1990. After Mandela's got out of jail a line of personalities craved nothing more than to be  photographed  with the “great man”, many of them either complicit, or at best, indifferent to apartheid.  During 1991–92 western governments, western think-tanks, the World Bank, and a range of business leaders put enormous energy into wooing Mandela and other ANC leaders with junkets and workshops. The white South African businessmen formed the Brenthurst group that successfully courted and co-opted key members of the ANC’s leadership, including Mandela.  "Financial Times" on May 25th 1994 took delight in reporting: "Mandela pledges lower spending and deficit cut". The analysis in this and in the follow-on article "Mandela pleases business" makes clear that the new regime will follow the path of other "national liberation" movements like the PLO or Algerian FLN and integarte itself with capitalism. While completely accepting the requirements of the profit system of production, these former rebels will seek to make South African capitalism more competitive on the world market. This  inevitably placed them in confrontation with the working class and is already turning them into the new police force over the black workers. Their main job  became not the elimination of capitalism, but making capitalism work. A task doomed to failure.

The image of Mandela as a living saint has been a decoy to offer credibility to the ANC and the vicious South African ruling class by association, legitimising it. Mandela has been a used by the rich and powerful to perpetuate a class system that has causes misery for the millions of poor South Africans Mandela is said to have “liberated”. The ANC is one of many groups around the world who claimed to be fighting against oppression and for “national liberation”. It has worked well for the capitalists. The ideology of black nationalism meant that the South African working class accepted the aims and interests of its exploiters, the capitalist class, as though they were its own. For the working class, in South Africa it was just be an exchange of one lot of exploiters for another. For sure, there has been  significant structural, legal, economic, political and social changes - but also a widening wealth gap that for many black inhabitants means very little has changed in real terms. Less overt racial laws, those that are class-based and biased in favour of big business, have, however ensured that the black majority remains landless, impoverished tenants. The country's protectionist economics - reinforced by sanctions isolation - was replaced by an open-door policy of neo-liberalism that has allowed cheap imports to flood the country, leading to the loss of  jobs.

“Once in power, the party’s official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was abandoned, with one of his ministers boasting that the ANC’s politics were Thatcherite. “You can put any label on it if you like,” he replied. “ …but, for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy.” “That’s the opposite of what you said in 1994.” “You have to appreciate that every process incorporates a change.” Few ordinary South Africans were aware that this “process” had begun in high secrecy more than two years before Mandela’s release when the ANC in exile had, in effect, done a deal with prominent members of the Afrikaaner elite at meetings in a stately home, Mells Park House, near Bath. The prime movers were the corporations that had underpinned apartheid.” -John Pilger

It was mid-way through Nelson Mandela's presidential  term that the ANC shut down all its quasi-socialist pretensions and embraced  GEAR (Growth Employment And Redistribution) that even surprised the IMF and World Bank with its austerity measures. There was also  state outsourcing and public-private partnerships (PPPs) which were  used as a key means of creating a black bourgeoisie via state-backed Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Even when public services are not fully privatised, they have been commercialised by the state. This means that the state runs the remaining ‘publicly’ owned services to maximise profits. World capitalism had achieved through Mandela and the ANC what they were incapable of achieving by the white Nationalists themselves because of the lack of a popular mandate.

The South African unemployment rate is 25 percent on average, but it is closer to 50 percent among young black workers, according to a recent study. In South Africa in 2008 the poorest 50% received only 7.8% of total income. While 83% of white South Africans were among the top 20% of income receivers in 2008, only 11% of our black population were. And whites, just 10 percent of the population of 48 million people, earn on average six times as much as blacks. It has the second highest degree of inequality in family income distribution in the world, only topped by Lesotho, a tiny kingdom within South Africa. The vast majority of people who are poor are still black. And what’s more, there’s now a huge divide within the black population. At the top are those “Black Diamonds,” men like Patrice Motsepe, a billionaire who made his fortune in mining. Others include top government officials like Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa, with wealth estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Their wealth and success are largely seen as the result of government contracts, and preferences given to black businesses through a very aggressive affirmative action program called “Black Economic Empowerment.” People feel those jobs are given to friends and family and people with political connections rather than on ability.

 Murray Bookchin once noted “There is no collective ‘white man’ who is the universal enemy of a collective ‘black man’”, because both blacks and whites are deeply divided by class and other hierarchies. True, rich whites abound in wealthy Sandton in Johannesburg, and huge numbers of poor blacks suffer in the immediately adjacent Alexandra slum. But rich blacks also have houses in Sandton – among them Nelson Mandela while hundreds of thousands of poor whites live in squatter camps and trailer parks. The ANC-led, largely black, state elite is allied to the largely white private corporate elite: together they wreak havoc upon the working class, and perpetuate the legacy of apartheid for the black, Coloured and Indian workers and poor, impoverish a growing section of the white workers, and terrorise migrant workers.

In 2008 anti-apartheid campaigner John Minto refused the South African Government's highest honour for foreigners, the Companion of O. R. Tambo  Award,  because he is "deeply dismayed" about conditions in that country. In an open letter, Minto explained "When we protested and marched into police batons and barbed wire here in the struggle against apartheid, we were not fighting for a small black elite to become millionaires. We were fighting for a better South Africa for all its citizens. The faces at the top have changed from white to black but the substance of change is an illusion."

In 1997, Nelson Mandela awarded South Africa's highest decoration The Star of Good Hope to the mass-murderer Indonesian dictator Suharto. Mandela’s true colour revealed! Millions of South Africans will mourn his passing but not his “legacy”.