Twenty years on from Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom, Jonathan Miller looks at the difference between the hope and the reality in South Africa.
On the 20th anniversary of his release from jail, South Africa’s frail 91-year-old living saint, Nelson Mandela, is expected to appear in Cape Town tonight to hear the “state of the nation” address from President Jacob Zuma.
The memory of that heady day clashing with the reality of the “New South Africa” two decades on, where the dreams of the country’s black underclass remain unfulfilled.
Less than a year ago, as South Africans were about to vote Zuma into power, I wandered around Alexandra township, not far from the gleaming towers of Johannesburg’s financial district, with Justice Malala, well known for his biting political commentaries.
“This is the reality,” he told me as we walked past shanty shacks and open sewers.
“These are the people whose dreams and aspirations have not been met. They still live on hope,” he said.
It was Nelson Mandela who instilled hope among his compatriots; he personified it, in fact.
On the momentous anniversary of his walk to freedom, I decided to check in with Justice again; I’m just off the phone.
“The ANC has betrayed the Mandela dream,” he said bluntly. “Politicians have forgotten him too soon. They are selfish and they are against the very people Mandela fought for.”
Justice has made a speciality out of needling Jacob Zuma in his columns. After nearly a year of President Zuma, he sounds very disenchanted.
One of his latest posts – considered required reading for those wishing to understand what’s going on in South Africa – is simply entitled “Foul stench of rotting Cabinet”. You get the idea.
Mr Zuma has recently distinguished himself by admitting to having had a 20th child – a love-child, not born to one of his three wives.
He said on the weekend that he “regretted the pain” but to many, this will have been the last straw. Zuma’s political honeymoon is well and truly over.
Tonight, the contrast between the Mandela dream and the Zuma reality will be brought into sharp focus. It’s not that Mr Zuma can be blamed for the way things are now, but he will have to put a lot of forward-looking gloss on things in his State of the Nation address.
He’ll talk about the government’s priorities in education, health, job creation, fighting crime and rural development and he’ll doubtless make more promises. Fewer and fewer South Africans will expect him to deliver.
And that’s the difference between the hope offered by Zuma and that offered by Mandela 20 years ago when everything seemed possible.
Now, the expectation of delivery has all-but evaporated. The reality is that South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world; the number living on less than a dollar a day has doubled in a decade. A thousand die of AIDS every day; 50 are murdered every day. One in four is out of work and political corruption is rife.
Wind the clock back 45 years, it was actually worse for South Africa’s majority population, under apartheid. That’s when Nelson Mandela made his famous statement from the dock in his Rivonia treason trial.
His final words spelled out the Mandela dream: “I have 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 needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Mandela has not sought to pass judgement on his successors; that’s not his style. But you’ve got to wonder what he makes of things now, whether he too feels his dream’s been betrayed.
“We need a hero,” Justice Malala wrote recently. “We need someone to give us a sign that amid their depression, this sadness of a dream imploding, we are still capable of making right what is wrong with our country.”