Lebogang Seale
JOHANNESBURG: With tears welling in her eyes, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela listened intently as Zimbabwean Herbert Sibanda recounted how he had managed to cheat death at the hands of a xenophobic mob.
The mob had come for him and his fellow shack dwellers in one of the extensions of Alexandra township, Johannesburg, as they hunted down foreign migrants.
As Madikizela-Mandela was focusing on Sibanda’s harrowing encounter, a voice suddenly rang out from the makeshift camp sheltering about 300 foreign nationals at the local police station.
“Please, Mrs Madiba, help us!” cried one man, as Madikizela-Mandela’s gaze turned to the “abandoned bundle” of foreign migrants huddled together among the pathetic remains of the little clothes and chattels they had been able to salvage ahead of the advancing mob.
It was on a blustery morning; Wednesday May 14, 2008, at the height of South Africa’s most violent wave of xenophobia that left more than 60 people dead and hundreds injured. The fear in Sibanda’s voice and the wretchedness of the masses cramped in the camp moved Madikizela-Mandela to tears.
“I am very, very sorry about what has happened. We will try to help you with what we can,” Madikizela-Mandela reassured them in her deep, velvety voice.
Today, seven years later, Madikizela-Mandela is battling to exorcise those reawakened demons. “That has haunted me since that time. You have no idea how painful I felt,” Madikizela-Mandela said.
Unlike 2008, Madikizela-Mandela has been unusually quiet during this recent wave of xenophobia that flared up in Durban before spreading to Johannesburg.
Last weekend, she was among the speakers scheduled to speak at a joint media briefing on xenophobia convened by the Zimbabwean Exiles Forum in Braamfontein, but she was conspicuous by her absence.
Beneath her silence lies a troubled soul, bewildered by the inclination by some of her countrymen to stoke the fires of hatred against foreign migrants. “I have been quiet because I have been so shattered about what is going on,” she told the Cape Times’s sister paper The Star.
Newspapers and talk shows on TV and radio have been full of questions about the underlying reasons for this most recent xenophobia. The government has been criticised for its inept and ignorant response, the president has blamed the media, while others, like ANC chairperson Baleka Mbete, have taken it further by blaming the xenophobia on a mysterious, unnamed and as yet undiscovered, third force:
“The attacks on foreign nationals, it’s becoming very co-ordinated and we’re keeping our eyes wide open. Our responsibility, of course, is how long they have been planning because of the way this thing is implemented. We know there’s always good and evil on earth,” she said.
While Madikizela-Mandela does not rule out such a possibility, she was her usual frank self about what she thinks are the real issues: unemployment, poverty and inequality and the concomitant service delivery quandaries.
“What I said in 2008, and what I said in Bekkersdal just before the (2014 national) elections, is exactly what is happening today,” she said.
The acclaimed “Mother of the Nation” was referring to her statements expressing deep concern that nothing had changed since she last visited the service delivery protests-torn township with the late SACP stalwart Chris Hani 21 years before.
It’s statements like that that have occasionally put Madikizela-Mandela at odds with her erstwhile comrades in the ANC-led government.
She remains defiant.
“If you remember, every time I tried to draw the attention of my colleagues to these problems, that is if we didn’t address them properly, we were bound to repeat exactly what the apartheid masters have done to our people. I remember when I cautioned our colleagues that if we did not deal with these problems at the time, we were likely to be faced with the same situation.
“I was always criticised for drawing our attention to the fact that it was not yet ‘uhuru’ (Swahili for “freedom”). I was branded a prophet of doom.”
Part and parcel of the service delivery issues, Madikizela-Mandela says, are the scourges of corruption, incompetence and mismanagement so pervasive in the government today.
Listening to her, it’s clear she has been keeping a close tab on the corruption-related upheavals hampering state-owned entities, as well as the law enforcement agencies.
“The bottom line will always be that the poor don’t have access to the resources of the country. But what do we think the people in the squatter camps think of us (politicians) when, every day you open the newspaper, there’s some negative talk of some government official… Eskom? What do you think they (will think) if they find that every one of our people, particularly the black males who are in senior positions, (are) investigated about issues of corruption?”
It’s a sad state of affairs, an indictment on the current government, that baffles her.
“Even the top policewoman (national police commissioner General Riah Phiyega) is being investigated. Every one of our people responsible for these institutions is being investigated? What is going on right now in the country?”
The ANC’s controversial cadre deployment policy has often been blamed for the mismanagement and corruption that has led to the near-collapse of most parastatals. The governing party has, however, remained steadfast in its defence of the policy.
Madikizela-Mandela was non-committal.
“Time will tell. What we know, and which is the problem, is that they are either suspended and being investigated for corruption or somewhere along the lines there would be misappropriation of funds. Every parastatal we are running, heads must roll. Why?”
Although she wags her fingers at the government for not fulfilling the service delivery promises, Madikizela is scathing of the rogue elements using that to destroy public property or loot foreign-owned shops. She felt impelled to act when Soweto residents looted shops not long ago this year.
“I said to my people, what’s the point of destroying the infrastructure we already have if you are protesting against service delivery and when you say foreigners are taking away your jobs? That’s madness.”
She might be upset at the xenophobic violence and at her wits’ end about the problems bedevilling the ANC-led government today, but she remains enthused about the values espoused by the pre-liberation ANC, as embodied by leaders such as Oliver Tambo, Chief Albert Luthuli, Moses Kotane and Lillian Ngoyi.
Then, she said, selflessness, discipline and collective leadership – and not careerism and opportunism – were the ethos that defined Africa’s oldest liberation movement.
“Those were the great leaders who gave up their lives and never expected any positions in return. That was the ANC of the day that I knew and that brought freedom.”
Madikizela-Mandela hasn’t given up hope. She doesn’t believe the problem is insurmountable.
“We were faced with a racist regime and they used Inkatha to fight us.
“There was chaos, and those living in the periphery of the hostels bore the brunt of the carnage. But if we manage to overcome that, we can overcome anything.”