To illustrate this, consider the following three statements by Mandela:

I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination –Rivonia Trial, 1964.

Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa – 10 May 1994, Inaugural Address.

Never again shall it be that this land will again experience the oppression of one by another – 10 May 1994, Inaugural Address.

None of those noble declarations has been realised. Indeed regardless of Mandela’s rhetoric, the political course the ANC has been implementing was its intention before 1994 and has been incrementally applied since then. By endorsing the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) at conferences, Mandela deviated from the core of his apparent commitment to non-racialism.

Since the cornerstone of the NDR is a one-party socialist state, the freedom from domination by one party and one group which Mandela espoused, becomes disingenuous. The recently amended Employment Equity legislation blatantly contradicts Mandela’s rhetoric, yet it is a fervent part of the process required to establish the NDR.

It is the task of every generation to reconsider history. Mandela’s rhetoric of 1964 and 1994 needs to be re-appraised in the light of his support for ANC’s long established goals.

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But 26 years on, race-based laws are actually more prolific than ever before. Let’s do the sums: between 1910 and 1948, seventeen race-based Acts of Parliament were passed. From 1949 to 1960, the foundation years of apartheid, 26 such Acts were promulgated. From 1960 to 1980, a further sixteen were passed. That totals 59 over a period of 70 years. From 1980, the NP began relaxing and dismantling apartheid.

According to researcher James Myburgh, since 1995, the ANC has promulgated 90 race-based laws in just 25 years. Whereas the cornerstone of apartheid was the Population Registration Act of race identity, the ANC has premised its racial identity agenda on demographic representivity.

Just as apartheid laws permeated all aspects of life, racial representivity requirements have become mandatory in every field of activity. In the quest for ‘transformation,’ even the Petroleum Pipelines Act has to fulfil racial quotas and have black management. Annually every institution is required to report to the Ministry of Labour on progress towards transformation. Job creation has become ideological bean counting.

All of this is in keeping with the SACP’s 1962 plan which called for revolutionary national racialization and is fundamental to the SACP’s National Democratic Revolution. Whereas South Africa survived the cancer of apartheid, the oppression and dystopia of communism is a terminal virus.

Sent into The Witness, The Citizen, The Star and The Mercury, 6 August 2020.

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Already sharing the ANC’s views on affirmative action, BEE and demographic representivity, which the DA semantically terms ‘diversity,’ its attempt to appropriate the aura of the Mandela legend is shabby but not surprising.  No matter how the DA chooses to spin its commonality with Mandela, historically he belongs to the ANC.

In claiming that it shares Mandela’s values, the DA would do well to appraise them more closely. Much is made of Mandela’s conciliatory role, yet he never renounced violence during the negotiating years leading up to the 1994 election. In his book titled The Prince and I, the late IFP MP, Mario Oriani Ambrosini, listed the following  in his deconstruction of the Mandela myth (pages 265-268):

• Although a civil war raged in KZN, Mandela delayed meeting Chief Buthelezi for a year after his release from prison. When they did meet, Mandela failed to implement the agreement to hold joint meetings to pacify violence-torn areas. As a result, a further 1,000 lives were lost.
• In 1995 Mandela admitted giving the order to shoot unarmed Zulus gathered outside the ANC’s Shell House HQ in Johannesburg on March 28, 1994. Fifty Zulus were killed and 180 injured.
• Mandela allowed the ANC to defy a court order on behalf of the families of those killed in the Shell House massacre.
• While Buthelezi was a minister in his cabinet, Mandela requested former SADF General Constand Viljoen to prepare a plan for the army to take military control of Ulundi and impose martial law in KZN. Viljoen declined the task.
• The controversial arms deal began during Mandela’s presidency.
• He never presided over a single cabinet meeting. They were run by Thabo Mbeki.

So much, then, for Mandela’s style of politics and values.

Sent into The Mercury and published, 16 Jan 2019.

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