What Mandela's illness tells us

Those who have tracked apartheid, Nelson Mandela, and the “new South Africa” down the years, are here again.

Once again Mandela’s ailing health at 94 summons us south, in case. Yes, in case he dies.

A huge enough event here, but an event with vast global impact too. Many people, many struggles, across the world have seen in Mandela’s example of forgiveness, leadership, and hope, a lodestar by which they can win their own struggles.

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It is hard to imagine the eventual passing of anyone in the world today being marked in the same way, on the same scale, as at some point Nelson Mandela’s will be marked.

He hasn’t been seen in public for more than two and a half years – when he was present at the World Cup when it was staged here in South Africa. Since then he has been at his home in the Eastern Cape and from time to time in hospital for remedial treatment from pneumonia and other irritants.

Yet despite his physical absence from the scene here, the political classes within the ruling ANC still crave the shield of his spiritual existence to protect them from the developing ructions beneath them. Corruption, maladministration, and incompetence, besiege their government.

Yet so long as Mandela actually lives – even if unseen – there is reluctance both within and beyond the ANC to confront head-on the failings from which they suffer.

Mandela is, these days, ill enough to die, and well enough to survive. But at 94, those close to him recognise that he cannot have that much longer amongst them. The sad reality is that here at least, in South Africa, people see that in living he somehow keeps a dream alive, but also unintentionally delays the moment when a step change in this country’s fortunes can be achieved.

Increasingly race is a reducing, even if historically present problem. The issues now are familiar to us in the north – poverty, excessive wealth, inequality and corruption.

There has been huge progress, the country feels to be more of a melting pot – three million immigrants from all over southern and central Africa. And money rather than race dictate access to the best and worst life offers. I was in the Alexandria township yesterday – as poor and wretched in parts as anywhere I have ever been – open sewers, uncollected garbage, and shack homes unfit for human habitation.

But in Soweto, great progress – still some bad spots, but a huge investment in new housing, a university, schools, hospitals, businesses, roads and sanitation.

South Africa remains a country with vast potential – bright people, vast wealth in natural resources, and yet. And yet it also has the capacity to fritter it away. Increasing violence between and amongst all communities, poverty at the bottom, and corruption at the top, have the ability to eat South Africa from within.

Mandela’s fading years merely serve to remind us of the great breakthrough and opening he achieved and the vast work that still needs to be done to take South Africa to where it truly belongs — amongst the coming economies of the 21st century.

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