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Future built on solid ground

'You don't have to burn down the house to make a braai'

I HAVE always been astounded by the persistent references in Zimbabwe's The Herald newspaper and its sister publications to former president Nelson Mandela as simply nothing more than what the African Americans call an Uncle Tom or house nigger.

A recent example of this is contained in the article in The Herald, January 11 2012, under the heading "Kill the Boer Indeed!"

It boldly proclaims, "But the question is why Westerners embark on this charade of celebrating Mandela as if they believed in his cause? . The answer is simple: Madiba, after taking the baton from the other nine ANC presidents before him, did not upset the applecart. He was content to have the crown without the crown jewels, and in so doing became the typical good African who does not pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to US foreign policy unlike his counterpart north of the Limpopo."

A similar sentiment was ex-pressed the following day about the ANC political leadership under the title "The day after the ANC centennial party". The article says: "South Africa's infantile disorder as it takes the young adult's step into the real world of increasingly competitive globalised economy, is that it appears it has chosen to comfort itself with the child's soothing medicine of economic justice. There is no economic justice in world economy."

Given the limited print space I have, I can only sketch out a few considerations to be borne in mind in any assessment of the South African liberation project.

This might help temper, if not remove, the gross denigration of the liberation credentials of Mandela post his release from prison and the liberation project he so selflessly and heroically championed.

Apartheid was described by the UN as a crime against humanity. It was recognised by the world body as one of the most inhumane forms of oppression and discrimination the modern world has seen.

It created a society that was not only divided against itself and physically and psychologically torn apart but also sought to create a multitude of black Africans that were less than human. This is the society Mandela inherited in 1994.

In recognition of this reality Mandela made nation-building and reconciliation one of the cornerstones of his five-year term in office.

He recognised that for the new nation to move forward on a solid foundation he needed to forge a common nationhood and a shared sense of belonging. It is under Mandela's stewardship that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was constituted.

He knew it was not possible to reconcile the past with the present, to forge a shared future without exorcising the atrocities of the past.

His approach disarmed those extreme rightwing Afrikaners who were exploding bombs and wantonly massacring black people in trains, townships and the villages.

The negotiations had been salvaged from the precipice of possible racial conflagration because he operated as a crafty reconciler.

Mandela is a Sigmund Freud who compelled us to recount the atrocities of the past, both as liberators and as erstwhile oppressors.

Today the South African experience of the TRC draws people from many post-conflict countries to come and learn from it.

The other traumatic reality Mandela inherited in 1994 was the all-pervasive legacy of Bantu education. It was introduced by Hendrik Verwoerd in 1953 to manufacture an army of black people for the unskilled labour market.

The ascension to power of the National Party in 1948 had damaged education of black Africans. The Act helped to codify this reality into law. It was a coldly calculated mental genocide, a racial cleansing of all faculties of the mind.

It systematically and deliberately excluded a number of key subjects like mathematics, engineering, physical sciences, actuarial sciences, architecture and others from the majority of black public learning institutions. Even in those subjects allowed there was an "A" grade for whites and an inferior "B" grade for blacks.

Even the commitment of the black democratic government in 1994 to introduce these subjects on a massive scale was severely hampered by the extreme scarcity of the teaching fraternity that could offer them.

The limited number that could was itself grossly under-qualified. To produce a qualified teacher or lecturer of these subjects requires on average 17 years, so the inferior system kept on reproducing itself.

To overhaul the entire Bantu education system needed drastic measures, yet there can't be any short cuts to that mission.

Every educationist will attest that to produce a solid learner, teacher and lecturer requires solid formative primary school years in literacy and numeracy.

That is where the project to overhaul the system had to begin.

One of the measures to ameliorate the situation was to import a great number of foreign teachers and lecturers without driving those that Bantu education had produced into massive unemployment.

A great number of the teachers and lecturers in these subjects even today come from other African countries such as Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and beyond.

The other measure was to retrain those Bantu education had produced. But, that in itself could only be an inadequate stopgap.

South Africa is today in its 17th year of political liberation but we are still dealing with the vestiges of that Bantu education.

The desired speedy transformation of the economy suffered a similar fate.

It was extremely difficult to find enough skilled and qualified South African black people to take over the commanding levers of the machinery of the sophisticated economy. There were limited chartered accountants, engineers, etc. because it needs solid mathematics and physical sciences to produce them.

Even some of the most successful black empowerment companies were for years chaired by South African black owners but employed white people as chief executives or chief financial officers.

One of the initiatives the government took was to deliberately second black individuals to understudy white executive personnel, mainly in state institutions, and to compel the corporate sector to comply with empowerment scorecards even at executive levels.

That partly explains why Mandela could not really "kill the boer indeed" in his five years in office.

The government put in place immigration laws that encourage the importation of scarce skills. It has recruited many Cuban medical doctors into rural hospitals.

There is hardly any higher academic institution of note that does not employ at least one Nigerian academic. There is hardly any big corporate finance institution that does not employ at least one Zimbabwean financial literate.

A black Zimbabwean fund manager in South Africa said to me the other day: "A lot of us Zimbabweans have become black African Jews building other nation's economies in the diaspora."

The liberation struggle led by the ANC was primarily premised on political mass mobilisation of the people to f to decide on the nature of the society we desire.

This level of mass mobilisation achieved by the ANC, the oldest liberation movement on the continent, was unprecedented.

Mandela inherited highly mobilised and politicised formations that, whilst all anti-apartheid, had different expectations of what liberation meant for them.

The ANC leadership is the first to admit some mistakes have been made in 17 years of political liberation. Indeed, to admit the pace of transformation of the economy and empowering of the black majority needs to be accelerated. It will also certainly admit "there is no economic justice in world economy".

However it will argue we should all strive for economic justice in our own national economies.

It is my understanding that the land and indigenisation policies in Zimbabwe are premised on the quest to achieve economic justice for all the people of Zimbabwe, black and white.

Similarly, the South African policies on land redistribution and broad-based economic empowerment are an attempt to achieve economic justice for all the people of South Africa, black and white.

Economic justice includes redressing economic injustices of the past. How we all get there is dictated by our different conditions.

In South Africa we also recognise many sectors of our economy are technically world class. The challenge is how to transform these without destroying their global competitive edge and catapult our economy backwards for decades.

Like a Zimbabwean friend of mine put it recently: "You don't have to burn down the house to make a braai."

While we continue to empower the people, we have to eradicate the negative legacies Mandela inherited to build on a more solid foundation for posterity.

  • Mavimbela is the South African ambassador to Zimbabwe

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