FINANCIAL Times columnist Gideon Rachman recently wrote a wonderful and thought-provoking column, trying to imagine the questions history students might get asked in 50 years’ time about major issues of the present. On SA, the question he imagined was, "How new is the new SA?" Great question, but I would ask an additional one: "What was Nelson Mandela’s contribution to the creation of the new SA, and why did it not last?"
It just so happens that we have a view on this question from none other than our current president, Jacob Zuma, and his answer is unintentionally instructive. The renowned interviewer Tian Wei spoke to him on the World Insight programme aired on Chinese television station CCTV.
The questions, as you might imagine, were more than puff-ball, but less than penetrating, and Zuma’s performance was pretty dismal, but contrary to some of the commentary, I didn’t think it was unusually terrible.
In any event, he was asked a common question, "What was the most important part of Mandela’s legacy"? It’s worth quoting his response in full: "President Mandela was made by the ANC to be great — that is very important to know. It is the ANC that is much, much more important to many of us, including President Mandela. He was part of shaping the policies of the ANC and the ANC has not changed policy. So its leaders will always be there. But times are moving and Mandela’s legacy will always be remembered; not just Mandela alone … Oliver Tambo and others. And we are sticking to what Mandela practised as the policy he believed in and he believed in until … he departed this world."
To me, this says so much about SA’s predicament. First, Zuma makes the false claim that Mandela has no independent legacy separate to that of the ANC. In fact, he claims it was the party that made Mandela, not the other way around. Second, and more correctly, he claimed Mandela was "part" of making the ANC’s policies as opposed, one supposes, to ANC policy being a function of his views alone. Third, he claims, only half correctly in my view, that the ANC has not changed policies.
But most importantly, he didn’t actually answer the question. He didn’t single out any aspect of Mandela’s personal approach that he views as important in any way. And that, ladies and gentlemen, says so much more than at first meets the eye.
Of course, there are and will be many views on Mandela’s legacy, but allow me to expound my own. His most important singular contribution was a world-view of profound humanism, but a humanism of a responsible, stoic and forgiving kind. That led him not only to the most well-known and celebrated aspect of his legacy; reconciliation, but also to a rather old-fashioned Victorianism, in which everybody has the duty to play their part in a singular mechanical system that would benefit all fairly.
In a sense, SA’s Constitution, with its cosmic claim on rights, balance and fairness, is an embodiment of this world-view. How far that is from Zuma’s world-view, which seems so rooted in a kind of careless rapaciousness, in which "duty" and "responsibility" are regarded as "restraints".
One of the most revealing portraits in the weekend press was the Sunday Times’ interview with Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane, one of Zuma’s biggest champions in the Cabinet. Mokonyane is one of the leaders in the assault on the Treasury, and has announced that she plans to table proposals at the ANC’s policy conference in 2017 to "reconsider" its powers. "Once policies and programmes are approved, funds must follow function — not the other way around. Fiscal policy cannot nullify delivery policy," she says.
As someone who covered Mandela’s presidency as parliamentary correspondent from the first day to the last, I can absolutely guarantee you he would never have agreed to that construction. He would have regarded it as dangerously irresponsible, verging on rapacious, for the simple reason that it is dangerously irresponsible. He appointed not one, but two finance ministers from outside his own party, and the third from the centrist wing of the party. He was acutely aware of the dangers of treating the fiscus as a bottomless pot to be tapped at will.
The consequences of this approach go beyond fiscal probity: they extend to leadership itself. Mandela bestrode a fractious party, and even more fractious alliance, because he was not and did not see himself a representative of a faction within it. By tolerating fiscal impropriety within the government, Zuma has unwittingly become a leader of a faction within the government rather than a figurehead of a movement as a whole. As a result, factions are drifting away from the movement, rather than leaning towards it.
It’s often claimed that the problem with SA’s current politics is that the state has been captured. I think it’s a little different: the state is a battleground that has been incompletely captured, and that battle is gradually diminishing us all, as wars always do.
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