THE WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS: HOMAGE TO NELSON MANDELA

The destiny of a nation, a continent, or the world, may seem to be foreordained and self-imposing on people. Yet its unfolding depends on a man who stands out of the lot and breaks up with the past by infusing into the collective what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger terms a new Zeitsgeist (spirit of the time). Such a man is a ‘destiny man’, an avatar. The avatar status encompasses diverse sections of human life but, beyond this diversity of its object, is defined by the imparting of the Zeitsgeist. Thus we can, for example, point to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx and Slavoj Zizek in philosophy; Shakespeare and Corneille in literature; and Constantine, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, Vladimir Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi and Kwame Nkrumah in politics.

Since the second half of the twentieth century the world has harbored the latest avatar: Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. This man is God’s gift to humankind in a particular context: the globalization of imperialism and the consecutive humanistic and nationalistic struggle to bring it down. He passed on on the 5^th of December 2013, aged 95, after achieving what seems to many observers a miracle in South Africa: the collapse of the inhumane Apartheid system, the advent of democracy, and racial reconciliation and coexistence. The following lines are as much a tribute to his highly marking life as a reflection on his legacy as bequeathed to the world. They consist in: (1) a summarizing of the Mandela legacy; (2) a realization of the hiatus between Mandela’s ideals and the cold reality of politics at both South African and international levels, thus localizing the world at the crossroads; and (3) a musing on the possibility of effecting an “RDP of the soul” towards a better South Africa and a better world.

1. THE NELSON MANDELA LEGACY

It’s hard to accurately describe the exhaustive legacy of a giant like Nelson Mandela. However, to easily grasp it so as to continuously live by it, we shall summarize this legacy in five principles: Ubuntu, freedom, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, reconciliation, and leadership as a service.

First, Ubuntu is the philosophy that dominated Mandela’s life; and it can be uncontested to say that nobody has embodied this principle of the Bantu ethics as Madiba. The US President Barack Obama rightly defined it in his tribute to the global icon: “the recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us”. Ubuntu grounded his dreams and inspired his actions for one, united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist South Africa.

Second, grounded on Ubuntu, freedom was his greatest dream. The idea that one is human only when one’s neighbor is treated as human, that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, implies that everyone ought to be equal, sharing in the same being free. He said: “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination…I’ve cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die”.

Third, to attain the ideal of freedom and democracy in South Africa, Mandela freely embraced the approach of sacrificing himself for the oppressed. He thus took the risk, in 1961, of smuggling himself out of South Africa to organize the Umkhoto We Sizwe, the ANC’s armed branch he had created, and to garner financial and military support across Africa. And, thereafter, he returned to South Africa, well aware that he would be arrested and jailed. And, calmly, fearlessly and unrepentantly, he spent 27 years in prison. Self-sacrifice is the peak of his spirituality, making him an imitator of Jesus Christ, who says: “There is no greater love than this: to lay down his life for one’s friends” (John 15:13), and who died on the cross to save humankind. From this spirituality of the highest kind of love stem his other virtues such as humility, integrity, accountability, and the caring for the future as expressed in his immeasurable love for children.

Fourth, Mandela shall be also remembered for having achieved the impossible: the forgiveness of his jailers and the reconciliation between the oppressor and the oppressed. As Obama brilliantly put it again: “It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and truth. He changed laws, but also hearts”. The lessons of forgiveness and racial reconciliation set South Africa apart from the lot of nations, making it a ‘miracle’, a beacon of hope of a more civilized world, freed from brutality and forceful domination over others both in national and international affairs.

Fifth, Mandela is the epitome of leadership as a service. Once elected president of the democratic South Africa, he didn’t spare time to deliver for all, especially for the historically disadvantaged, the black people. In order to correct the injustice of the past, he came up with the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the most ambitious social development strategy ever implemented in the Third World. Since its inception, millions of houses have been built, social grants delivered, bursaries awarded, health care made available, and empowerment opportunities given to the poor at a very low cost. Thanks to the RDP-led social development, South Africa is proud to belong to the small club of developing nations that have reached the United Nations Millennium Development Goals for poverty reduction, fixed in 2014.

2. NELSON MANDELA’S SHORTCOMINGS

However, Madiba was not a god, but of our human race. Therefore his life was speckled with shortcomings. “I’m not a saint”, he said about himself, “unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying”. The most noticeable of them lie in his term as state president, as his lofty ideals are confronted by the heartlessness of the real politick and capitalism. We shall point out three. First, the RDP strategy, though it set in motion the agenda of human and social development, was short-lived by the deficiency on economic development aspect. The large-scope expenditure it required entailed a big public debt and the consecutive reversing of the prospect of growth. This was reflected in economic contraction and the rand free fall. The bleak situation was compounded by the RDP bureaucratic contradictions, which brought its office to a closure in 1996, and to its replacement by the market-oriented GEAR strategy. The closure of the RDP gave rise to a bitter reality Mandela had to live with: the impossibility to eradicate social inequalities during his lifetime.

The second shortcoming, understandable within the context of the post-Apartheid state being torn between the pressure of fast improving the lives of the black majority and the imperative to toe the line with the liberal world order, is the failure to reconcile conflicting tendencies (the right and the left) within the broad tripartite alliance. Thus, in the aftermath of the launch of the GEAR strategy, Mandela assisted powerless to the feud between the left (Cosatu and the SACP) and the so-called 1996-class led by Thabo Mbeki) within the alliance—which feud continued to cloud the political scene throughout the Mbeki administration and is now threatening the end the alliance because of blatant corruption and events such as Marikana and e-toll controversy.

The third shortcoming, due to his many years in prison, which deprived Mandela of sharper understanding of dismaying intricacies of African and world diplomacies (based on national interests rather than on lofty universal values), is the inappropriate handling of some international issues, such as the Nigerian crisis under President Sani Abacha and the post-Mobutu Congo tragedy. As regards the Nigerian crisis, after the death by hanging of the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight fellow Oguni activists by the country’s junta, the Mandela administration decided to punish Abacha’s regime; yet the move was a debacle. The ANC’s Pallo Jordan reported in 2001: “When on the eve of a Commonwealth Summit, Sani Abacha ordered the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, then President Mandela moved swiftly to break off relations and called for tough measures against the Nigerian military junta. While Britain, France, the USA, Germany and others verbally applauded his actions, not one of those countries followed South Africa’s example. British oil multinationals continued business as usual; the USA kept up a vigorous dialogue with Abacha while the US corporations expanded business contracts; France sought to exploit the tension between London and Abuja to its own advantage. South Africa held the moral high ground, but in isolation” (Quoted in South Africa-Zimbabwe Relations, Volume 1: Pre-Colonial to 2006, edited by SALO, Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013, p.74). In Africa the debacle remained the same. The scholar Adebajo adds: “…Even his [Mandela’s] iconic status failed to rally a single southern African state to take action against Nigeria. The fuse of the volcano that ‘Madiba’(…) has threatened to explode under Abacha had spectacularly failed to ignite. Instead, it was South Africa that was being accused by many African leaders of becoming a Western Trojan horse, sowing seeds of division in Africa and undermining African solidarity” (Ibid).

The Abacha debacle exposed Mandela’s inaptitude to drive African and world powers to observing universal principles. On the contrary, importantly, the business-inclined powers converted him to ‘pragmatism’. This is reflected in the way he handled the Congo tragedy: he privileged South Africa’s national interest over the ideal of justice in favor of the DRC and against its Rwandan and Ugandan aggressors. Indeed, contrary to Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia, Pretoria rejected in August 1998 the call by President Laurent Kabila to militarily intervene, within the SADC framework, to oust the Congo’s invaders, championing diplomacy to quell the crisis. Yet, soon after the aggression of the DRC by Rwanda and Uganda, the Mandela administration launched the military Operation Boleas aimed at propping up a regime that was largely contested in Lesotho after elections and facing a military coup (South Africa-Zimbabwe Relations, ibid). Why this double standard towards the Congo and Lesotho, both SADC members? The answer is, South African national interest. In Lesotho the stake was the protection of “the Katse Dam water scheme which supplies the heartland of South Africa’s economy” (Ibid); whereas, in the DRC, the aim was to ensure the exploitation of this country’s immense mineral resources by South African mining companies against the backdrop of a Kabila regime growing more arrogant and uncooperative. This is why Mandela’s government exposed a shocking contradiction: while it advocated for peace negotiations in the Congolese turmoil, it kept sending arms to Rwanda, one of the Congo’s aggressors to punish Laurent Kabila (Lanotte, Olivier, Guerre Sans Frontières. De Joseph Désiré Mobutu à Joseph Kabila, Bruxelles: Complexe/GRIP, Coll. « Les Livres du GRIP », No 243-245, 2003, p.191 ; Matundu, A.N., Role of External Forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1997 to 2001, Master’s Dissertation, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007, p.57).

These shortfalls caused Madiba to be disgusted with real politick as a dirty game at both national and international stages. We believe that they played an important role in his decision to retreat from public life after just a term in power. Notwithstanding them, Madiba is the world’s greatest man of our times. He is a sign of the Almighty God’s power acting through human weakness. His legacy is a proof that each of us can achieve great things in spite of our respective weaknesses.

3. THE WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS

Madiba’s passing heralds the demise of the world in its current configuration in the near future. For his term in office as state president has taught us that, given the present-times materialistic civilization that is organized by an utterly deficient legal system at both national and international levels, it is impossible to simultaneously pursue the national interest and respect the universal ideals of the rights of Man and of the peoples, and of equality, and of fraternity in the love of the neighbor. Ideologies such as communitarianism, communism, socialism, fascism and ethnicity are gone by. And it has been ensured that the current dominant liberal democracy and capitalism cannot be sustainable because of the abovementioned contradictions. Within democratic nations, including South Africa, the constitution and other laws are unable to overcome corruption and many more crimes, to bestow justice, and to make citizens virtuous. The philosopher Alaisdair MacIntyre lamented on the tactic of evenhandedness, instead of fairness, by the US Supreme Court in the Bakke case, thus denouncing the current obsession by the judges with the arbitrary preservation of peace and security (in midst of conflicting interests), instead of justice, in society (Pojman, Louis, Political Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, The Mcgraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2002, p. 302). MacIntyre’s objection to liberal-democratic law is backed by Aristotle, who has demonstrated the limits of the idea of the rights of man as protected by the law. He opposes the liberal notion of the law of the political community as merely “a guarantor of men’s rights against one another”, and proposes instead a perfectionist conception of the law as “a rule of life such as will make the members of a polis good and just” (Ibid, p. 322). This suggests that human rights do not have per se the power to compel people living into a polity to their observance; hence, they are subject to recurrent violations since the law of the democratic state—which is their guardian—is tasked with a mere defense of one’s rights against another’s aggression. Even recently, in South Africa, Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, at a lecture delivered at Wits University, pointed out the incapacity of the country’s constitution to effectively fight crime in spite of harsh punishments.

The impotency of the liberal-democratic law vis-à-vis injustice and crime is echoed in the international law. It was a great consternation for Madiba to watch America, which champions the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness under one God, be drawn to the Iraq war by President George Walker Bush under the false pretext that President Saddam Hussein was owning the weapons of mass destruction. Bush stated: “With or without the United Nations, we [America] will invade Iraq”. And he did it without the world body’s green light. President Obama, through the same tribute to Madiba, used clearer words to showcase the need of new ideas for a better world: “…in America and South Africa, and countries around the globe, we cannot allow our progress to cloud the fact that our work is not done.  The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality and universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before, but they are no less important.  For around the world today, we still see children suffering from hunger, and disease; run-down schools, and few prospects for the future.  Around the world today, men and women are still imprisoned for their political beliefs; and are still persecuted for what they look like, or how the worship, or who they love”. The world is at the crossroads. What can be done? After Mandela, we need to effect the “RDP of the soul”.

4. CONCLUSION: HOW CAN WE EFFECT THE “RDP OF THE SOUL”?

Following in the footsteps of Aristotle to address the current contradictions, Madiba proposed the “RDP of the soul”, that is, the transformation of the hearts from the selfish race to material acquisitiveness towards selfless deeds to the benefit of others, just as the RDP strategy positively transformed the communities of the historically disadvantaged. In other words, a spiritual change must supersede the social change in order to better South Africa and the world. He was contemplating the possibility of spawning many Mandelas on a permanent basis for the best South Africa and the just world to become a reality. But how can be brought about this RDP of the soul? The love of God, who the contemporary humanity arrogantly declared dead after Nietzsche, is the panacea; for without it Nelson Mandela would not have the strength to forgive the oppressor, to reconcile races, and to implement caring policies for the poor. It is to stop being a private matter and become a public affair. This is the sole way to heal South Africa and every single nation of the world. To practically achieve this, these criteria of the democratic unit spelt out by Robert Dahl (Democracy and Its Critics, Yale University Press, 1989, 397 p), such as democratic process, popular referendum on the political constitution, primary political rights, personal freedom, and self-determination should be preserved. Nevertheless, democracy shall be fulfilled if, overcoming both liberal democracy and dirigisme, these criteria offer a totally demilitarized stage for the hegemonic rise of virtue-based political movements, which could reconcile society with God. The outcome could be a theocratic constitution that is open to change if secular parties arise to power in the future. In South Africa, this outcome could materialize either through the ANC if its members redirect their politics by leaning on God, or through the rise of a theocentric ideology, such as the budding Christocracy. Finally, on the international stage, a better world—the one contemplated but not attained by Madiba—is possible with the networking of hegemonic theocentric movements and their merging into a world body to counter-balance the United Nations. After a long walk to freedom, we must commit ourselves to a long walk to love.