Some of the thousands of mourners who waited patiently to view former South African President Nelson Mandela’s body while it lay in state at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Courtesy: Mercedes Sayagues

By Mabvuto Banda
QUNU, South Africa, Dec 15 2013 (IPS)

As South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, was laid to rest at his childhood home of Qunu in the Eastern Cape, Malawi’s President Joyce Banda told mourners that it was Mandela who taught her how to forgive those who tried to keep her from becoming southern Africa’s first female head of state.

Speaking at the funeral on Sunday, Dec. 15, Banda said she had been deeply moved by Mandela’s life before she had even met him. She told mourners that she had a moving conversation with the world’s most prominent statesman just months before she was to become president of Malawi in 2011."I learned that leadership is about failing in love with the people that you serve and the people falling in love with you." -- Malawian President Joyce Banda

“I was deeply touched by his spirit of forgiveness, his passion to put people first, and his courage. These attributes have greatly influenced my life,” Banda told mourners who included U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey, entrepreneur Richard Branson, the United Kingdom’s Prince Charles, and American civil rights campaigner Reverend Jesse Jackson. Mandela died on Dec. 5, after a long illness. He was 95 years old.

“At that moment I did not know that I was to become president of the Republic of Malawi a few months down the line. At that moment [before] I had become president of Malawi I had been isolated, humiliated, called names and escaped an assassination attempt on my life. I found myself in a situation where I had to work with those same people who prevented me from becoming president of my country,” Banda said.

When Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika died in April 2011, Banda, who had been named Mutharika’s running mate in 2009, had been expelled from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and was isolated politically.

At the time of Mutharika’s death she remained the country’s vice-president and his successor. However, some within Mutharika’s inner circle had attempted to delay announcing news of his passing to ensure that his brother, Peter, could take over the presidency. They failed.

“I had to forgive, but I had to forgive without any effort because my Madiba [Mandela’s clan name] had prepared me,” said Banda to wild applause from the audience.

Malawi’s President Joyce Banda says she learned how to forgive and what it means to be a leader from late South African President Nelson Mandela. Credit: Katie C. Lin/IPS

Malawi’s director of information, Chikumbutso Mtumondzi, told IPS after the speech that Banda’s humility made her a champion of Malawi’s vulnerable.

“She has learnt a lot from watching and reading about Mandela’s leadership style and this is being seen in how she is working with her adversaries and helping the poor,” he said in a telephone interview.

“She demonstrated forgiveness by re-appointing the same ministers who plotted to stop her from ascending to power constitutionally following the death of President Mutharika. She is building houses for the poor and looks after so many disadvantaged children,” he said.

Banda took a personal pay cut of 30 percent and put her predecessor’s private jet up for sale after she came to power. She moved to restore donor confidence in Malawi by implementing an austerity budget, promising poverty reduction and justice for the disadvantaged.

But Banda, voted by Forbes magazine as Africa’s most influential woman, said she learned from Mandela’s example.

“I learned that leadership is about failing in love with the people that you serve and the people falling in love with you…we will remember Tata as a great reformer who championed democracy and dedicated his life to selfless service,” she said.

Banda, who is also chairperson of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), said that the region “will strive to emulate President Mandela’s stature and spirit so that his legacy can live on.”

“In the SADC region we remember Tata [Mandela] as a great reformer who championed the cause of humanity, deepened democracy and dedicated his life to selfless service. A man who worked tirelessly to promote national, regional and world peace…. The ideals of political, social and economic emancipation that [he] stood for will inspire us forever as a region,” she promised.

African Union chair, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, pledged to continue with the ideals that Mandela believed in.

“Humanity is better off because it had the good fortune of having Mandela…the champion of peace and justice and we pledge to continue with those ideals,” he said.

Mandela’s flag-draped casket left Pretoria on Saturday, Dec. 14, after lying in state for three days. It was accompanied by a military guard of honour and was flown to Qunu after a solemn ceremony at the Waterkloof Airforce Base, organised by the ruling African National Congress.

Mandela, hailed for leading South Africa out of decades of apartheid, became the first icon from a line of famous South African anti-apartheid heroes like Chris Hani, Govan Mbeki, and Steve Biko, all of whom were from the Eastern Cape, to be buried in his ancestral home.

Thousands of invited guests arrived at the rural village for Mandela’s burial. A dome-shaped marque, constructed for the ceremony, transformed the little village, which from now on will be known globally as Mandela’s final resting place.

Military jets and helicopters hovered in the skies and access to the compound, perched on a hilltop overlooking the traditional village homes, was restricted to family members, a few relatives and invited guests.

“He was the best thing that ever happened to South Africa,” said Gideon Nasilele, who was among the thousands who travelled to Qunu to pay their last respects to Mandela.

“He was a man of incomparable vision and a hero for so many of us…his death leaves a huge power vacuum in South Africa,” Nasilele told IPS.

Nelson Mandela in 1937. Credit: Public domain

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

Perhaps it’s a false contradiction. But today there are many who stress the pacifist message with which South Africa’s Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) emerged from prison in 1990, while few put an emphasis on his rebellion against apartheid, including armed rebellion, which landed him in prison.

Mandela was a political activist and a revolutionary at least since 1942. Two years later he joined the African National Congress, becoming a founding member of the Youth league, and leading the movement, which had been inconsequential for decades, to more radical positions.

Mandela was a rebel when he headed the civil disobedience campaign against the unjust laws of the white segregationist regime in 1952, and when, although he was a poor student, he qualified as a lawyer and set up the country’s first black law firm.

Because he was a rebel he was banned more than once, arrested and prosecuted in the Treason Trial, before he was finally acquitted in 1961. He was a rebel when he went underground.

But above all he stayed true to his rebelliousness after the Sharpeville massacre of 69 unarmed demonstrators during a Mar. 21, 1960 protest against the apartheid laws, the subsequent state of emergency, the arrest of 18,000 people and the banning of the ANC and other organisations.

He understood then that demonstrations, strikes and civil disobedience were not enough to shake the foundations of apartheid, whose structure had become more sophisticated, to the absurd extent of creating the Bantustans or territories set aside for blacks.

It was an act of rebellion to lead the armed struggle in 1961 and help create the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). And to secretly leave the country and seek support and guerrilla training.

South Africa was a useful bridgehead for the Western powers – the same ones that today honour Mandela as a hero – in a region convulsed by anti-colonial liberation struggles and the Cold War.

In the 1970s the United States, France and Britain, trading partners of the regime, vetoed a motion to expel South Africa from the United Nations. And although the United Nations Security Council established a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa in 1963, it only became mandatory in 1977.

By the 1980s, apartheid had made South Africa an international pariah. But it wasn’t until 1985 that the authorities in the United States, Britain and the European Community adopted economic sanctions against the regime – in large part to appease the growing public outrage in their countries.

Mandela spent years in prison, starting in 1962. In 1964 he was tried for sabotage and sentenced to life. His rebelliousness sustained him for 27 years in prison, during which time he turned down three offers of parole.

The universal right to rebel against oppression has often been the object of suppression and above all of distortion and misrepresentation.

In the case of South Africa, it took the United States a long time to think it through. Not until 2008 did it remove the ANC from the State Department list’s of terrorist organisations – nine years after the end of Mandela’s term as president.

When he emerged from his years behind bars in 1990, and especially when he was sworn in as president in 1994, Mandela knew that dismantling apartheid would serve no purpose if the country fell apart in the process as a result of divisions and a thirst for vengeance.

And he then became the most active and dedicated of pacifists, taking his rebelliousness into a new terrain – the exercise of democracy and of dialogue as a solution to conflicts.

As an IPS article states, many South Africans today are still bogged down in poverty and inequality. And the ANC is widely accused of falling prey to nepotism and a lack of transparency.

It is no simple task to shake off a legacy that dates back to British colonial times. Segregation and its economic causes leave deep marks. It’s not enough just to have a black president, as illustrated by the United States, whose prisons still hold a disproportionate number of blacks.

But now South Africans can channel their rebelliousness against those scourges in a democratic state under the rule of law – for which Mandela, the rebel, must be thanked.

Diana Cariboni is IPS co-editor in chief.

First National Bank’s CEO Michael Jordaan was forced to deny he had resigned after the ruling African National Congress took exception to bank ads criticising the government. Credit: John Fraser/IPS

By John Fraser
JOHANNESBURG , Jan 30 2013 (IPS)

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nonetheless, it is difficult to miss the irony in the following sentence from a news release, sent out by South Africa’s First National Bank on Jan. 17.

It reads:  “At 18:57, on 17 January 2013, FNB launched a new brand campaign with a live broadcast to South Africa. The broadcast carried a message from the voices we don’t often hear, the children of our great country. A message we believe will inspire the nation.”

It is debatable whether the nation was inspired, but certainly the governing African National Congress (ANC) party was incensed.

For, as well the messages from the children of South Africa in the advertisement itself, there were far more outspoken video clips posted by FNB on YouTube with children expressing strong criticism of government, and of one government minister – to which the ANC took strong exception.

On Friday Jan. 25, the bosses of FNB and of its parent company Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) were summoned to the ANC’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg – which is just a few minutes stroll from FNB’s own headquarters.

The bankers apologised, fully aware that the ANC and the South African government at national, provincial and municipal level, is a multi-billion dollar customer of FNB.

The apology might have been intended to end the matter, but it didn’t. Controversy raged on.

First National Bank’s charismatic CEO Michael Jordaan was forced to deny he had resigned over the issue, and the bank still insists its campaign – entitled “You Can Help” – will continue.

As discussion has raged on the media and elsewhere, there has been debate about whether the criticism of the politicians by the children who appeared in the YouTube clips had been scripted.

The bank said the TV commercials were scripted, and the child actors were paid for these, but the more outspoken interviews which the bank posted on YouTube were not. These have been characterised by FNB as “research clips.” First National Bank has been keen to point out that its apology was specifically related to the YouTube clips, and that it stands by the TV campaign, which it does not believe is offensive.

However, the incident has highlighted once again the uneasy relationship between business and government in South Africa, and the extent to which business needs to tread carefully if it wishes to avoid irritating the ANC government.

The current clash has brought back memories of February 2007, when the then head of RMB Paul Harris was forced to axe an anti-crime advertising campaign because it was perceived by the politicians to constitute an attack on government.

Petrochemical and synthetic fuels company Sasol has also been at the receiving end of ANC anger for appearing to criticise black economic empowerment in South Africa, in a document which it filed with the New York Stock Exchange.

And there have been frequent tensions between the mining sector and ANC ministers, with London-based mining house Anglo American having been a target for particular criticism.

Helen Zille, the head of the opposition Democratic Alliance party, in a statement on Jan. 30 suggested that: “FNB buckled and withdrew the video clips after the ANC argued they could deter investment.

“That is deeply ironic. The ANC’s bullying of a private company, its apparent ability to influence state tenders, and its failure to understand the constitutional right of free speech, will do far more to kill investment than anything a child might have said in a YouTube clip.”

Zille suggested that the ANC put pressure on the bankers, by threatening to withdraw government business, a suggestion that was dismissed by ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu.

“It is only people like her who have such a simple-minded approach,” he told IPS.

And FNB’s head of corporate communications Virginia Magapatona also shrugged off the suggestion.

“To date, it’s been business as usual,” she told IPS.

Jordaan himself was unwilling to continue discussing the issue when he was approached by IPS.

“After nine days of discussion on one advertisement, we consider the matter closed,” he stated.

Mthembu also insisted that the matter is now over, despite the continuing flurry in the South Africa media and social media.

“We are done,” he said. “The matter is closed. We have resolved the matter and we are happy.”

Pretoria-based businessman Mario Pretorius, who is CEO of JSE AltX listed telecommunications company Telemasters, told IPS that he believes there has been permanent damage to relations between business and government from the FNB-ANC clash.

“I think the ANC has over-reacted,” he said. “The constitution allows freedom of expression, but if there is something which breaches the law, the ANC should say what it is.

“If not, the law allows us the right to express our opinion.”

Pretorius suggested that following the apology from the bank to the ANC “the ANC now thinks it can get anyone to run away.”

He agreed with Zille that FNB has put its business interests above principle.

“I am appalled you can put the expediency of having (a government) account above principle,” he said.

“I think business is now on the back foot, and maybe in a permanent way.”

However, the head of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation research and advisory body, Greg Mills, suggested that tensions exist elsewhere in Africa between governments and business.

“Of course this will happen elsewhere in Africa – as elsewhere in the world – but usually in those countries with autocratic systems, where governance and choice is subject not to law, but to political whim,” he said.

And when asked whether such a clash would have been as public elsewhere in Africa, he responded: “In some other countries, yes.

“But it’s also an indication of South Africa’s great strength in its free press, civil society and business community.”

There have been few signs of the debate dying down just yet, with the relationship between business and government in South Africa also being highlighted in the recent election of businessman Cyril Ramaphosa as deputy president of the ANC.

If he can provide an effective bridge between the politicians and business people in South Africa there may be fewer public spats.

And in the short-term, it is almost certain that business will tread more carefully, having seen once again how sensitive the Pretoria government is to criticism.

“There isn’t a complete understanding of how business operates,” said Neren Rau, the CEO of the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a business organisation.

“What is sometimes lacking is an understanding of the objectives of business, the manner in which businesses are governed and performance-managed.

“I believe the ANC’s reaction could have been more restrained.  It would be foolish for FNB to compromise their relationship with a key client (government) so there can be little doubt that they had bona fide intent in eliciting views toward a better South Africa.”

Rau said that initially the clash has had a negative impact on relations between government and business.

“But it was positive in respect of how this was amicably resolved,” he added.

“The ANC at least is becoming sensitive to investor perception and business confidence, which was sometimes discounted in the past.  It will remain a positive outcome if business does not lose heart in continuing to pursue constructive engagement toward a better South Africa and if we can more actively engage on matters of investor and business confidence.”