The chaotic State of the Nation Address can only succeed at taking away from the gains of what Mandela and his peers sacrificed for, writes Don Makatile.
Saturday marked 27 years since that historic moment now since etched in the collective memory of the nation when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison a free man, hand-in-hand with the very woman apartheid laws denied a normal spousal life.
When he left the then Victor Verster Prison, now Drakenstein Correctional, Mandela was emerging from a 27-year period of incarceration. For the benefit of the democratic ideal for which he’d vowed in his speech from the dock in 1964 to live and even die for, if needs be, Mandela left his antipathy at the gate of the correctional facility: “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
A lot of what Mandela was prepared to give for the attainment of a free and democratic South Africa is embedded in the words of this quote.
This watershed anniversary on Saturday arrived on the back of what was, to all intents and purposes, a chaotic State of the Nation address that can only succeed at taking away from the gains of what Mandela and his peers sacrificed to usher in this new dispensation that we now seem to take for granted.
Some among the Struggle stalwarts did not make it out of the prison gates - they died at the gallows. Some had their marriages ruined forever and, unlike Mandela and his then wife Winnie, would never find the chance to stroll lovey-dovey down the road.
Of course the saddest of all, some were martyred, often dying in faraway lands like Tanzania, Zambia or wherever else around the world exile took them.
The brave among them, like Solomon Mahlangu, found a moment to bequeath us this very freedom as they were frogmarched for a date with the hangman.
The history of the struggle for liberation can never be rewritten, either by revisionists or any other quarter with wishes to embellish it.
It is this history that you’d be forgiven to think would be jealously guarded by the governing ANC, as the rightful custodians of Mandela’s legacy.
But the former liberation movement has only managed to give some among us reason to ruminate on the wisdom Mandela shared at a Cosatu conference in 1993: If the ANC does to you what the apartheid government did to you, then you must do to the ANC what you did to the apartheid government.”
They can deny it all they want but the ANC is a party at war with itself, just three years after Madiba’s death. Its internal rumblings are a far cry from what Madiba and his elder brother - Oliver Reginald Tambo, could have envisioned for the party they variously kept together in prison and exile, respectively.
It is a matter for President Jacob Zuma’s conscience to guide him on whether or not he’s equal to the task of carrying the legacy of these stalwarts of the ANC to fruition.
Those in Opposition hold firmly to the view that President Zuma has glaring flaws in his character.
Luthuli House hold a diametrically opposed opinion of the character traits of their Number 1.
It is up to posterity to decide if Zuma will be held in the same esteem as all the shining lights that have led the once glorious movement of the people.
Mandela once quipped that upon his arrival at the Pearly Gates, he’d ask directions to the nearest branch of the ANC where he’d readily sign up.
The ANC that showed its face in Parliament on Thursday, a party that fashions itself as leader of society, is currently in a state to hardly attract new members, among those who have already crossed to the other side.
Mandela and others must be turning in their graves.