Letter from Cape Town: Nelson Mandela’s ‘Rainbow Nation’ in the dock

"The case of fraud involved in the funeral of Nelson Mandela continues in court," said the SABC TV news anchor.

In a single sentence, the promise of Mandela's hard-won and much-admired 'Rainbow Nation' was illustrated, most sharply in its absence.

The stark loss of what once seemed possible – in that South Africa had already ‘beaten the odds’ and somehow averted an all-out, and once seemingly inevitable, brutal and bloody race war – was summed up in the TV anchorwoman’s ‘yet-another-story’ presentation.

What once would have been unimaginable had happened: those ostensibly part of ‘the struggle’ against racism, colonialism and apartheid had ‘sold their souls’ for illicit gain from the death of none other than Madiba, the most famous and beloved former political prisoner in history.

Bland as it was, the statement also underscored the degree to which corruption was the ‘order of the day’ by the time South Africans – much like those in the UK and around the world have had to do in recent days with the passing of Queen Elizabeth II – were forced to come to terms with the reality that even the best and most beloved leaders leave this realm of existence at some point.

Barely had Mandela passed at his home in Qunu, in the Eastern Cape Province, on December 5, 2013, when the vultures started circling, it was subsequently learnt.

Mandela funeral

Charges of fraud related to Mandela’s funeral, attended by heads of state from around the world, were laid and then withdrawn for “further investigations” in 2019 before being reinstated with additional charges and names added to the charge sheet.

Fifteen people were arrested and appeared in court in early 2021, most of them prominent members of Mandela’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) in the Eastern Cape province.

The province’s former health minister and the ANC’s regional chair are among those accused of corruption and money-laundering amounting to about $700,000.

Prosecutors allege they made fraudulent claims for the transportation of mourners and venues used in the city of East London for memorial services for Mandela.

The accused appeared in court again last week, just as the news of Queen Elizabeth’s passing was racing through the global ethers, bringing to mind the worldwide shock and outpourings of grief that followed the great Madiba’s passing.

The flat-toned reporting of the TV news anchor, telling viewers that those who had fiddled the books to make more from Mandela’s death than they were due, seemed to be an ironic and aggravating emphasis to the general unpleasant feeling in South Africa.

'Golden dawn'

The once promising ‘golden dawn’, as birthed and nurtured in its nascence by Mandela, the ultimate trans-barrier leadership figure, had long since morphed into a sordid free-for-all of overt and outright thievery from the public coffers.

And much of the stealing was done in the name of the ‘party of liberation’, a former ANC treasurer-general having earned the tag ‘Mr 10 percent’, as any major projects, even those not involving the government but needed its approval, would get the nod only if the party got ‘its cut’.

The look on Chief Justice Raymond Zondo’s face said it all, as he heard testimony to this effect from several ANC leaders during his recently concluded four-year probe of systemic ‘state capture’ graft that has gripped Mandela’s liberation movement, Africa’s oldest.

Shaking his head, Zondo asked how this had come to be.

The answer seemed clear enough: bit by bit, and born of a ‘culture of entitlement’ among those who had actually fought their whole lives against apartheid’s evil system of falsely dividing Africans based on the colour of their skin into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

But this culture had become a wildly out of control darkness in the heart of a movement no longer about liberation and equality for all, but about how much individuals could steal from their compatriots.

Many other South Africans felt and feel precisely the same as the appalled Justice Zondo, whether or not they vote for the ANC.

Mandela, despite decades of demonising propaganda by the apartheid state, which even refused his name to be printed or his image to appear in media or anywhere at all, had become beloved of almost all South Africans by the end of his only term as the first post-apartheid leader.

The far right

Of course, there were hold-outs, on the far right in the form of white supremacists and on the far left those who hold that only ‘black’ people can be ‘African’, and that ‘Africa should be for Africans only’.

But they were few and Madiba was beloved.

He made it a point to become so, emphasising with the Dalia Lama the importance of forgiveness in order to be free of the pains of the past, but also insisting on acknowledging the harms done, hence the landmark Peace and Reconciliation Commission process, since copied by other countries with a history of deep social conflict.

In this, his intention of bringing all South Africans together was not that far off what Elizabeth tried to do with the British people, specifically, and the Commonwealth in general.

It is no surprise that the two got on exceptionally well, so well that he contravened royal etiquette, and was allowed to, giving Queen Elizabeth II his own ‘special name’ out of respect and affection: 'Motlalepula', which means 'to come with rain' in the indigenous Setswana language.

"By his own admission, Nelson Mandela was an anglophile, and in the years after his release from prison, he cultivated a close relationship with the Queen. He hosted her in South Africa and visited her in England, taking particular delight in exploring Buckingham Palace," the Nelson Mandela Foundation said in the wake of Elizabeth’s passing last week.

"They also talked on the phone frequently, using their first names with each other as a sign of mutual respect as well as affection.”

During a banquet hosted by Mandela in 1997 for then Prince Charles, now King Charles III, Mandela explained the reasoning behind coining this special name for the Queen: “her visit coincided with torrential rains that we had not experienced in a long time”.

"African Friend"

With the world acknowledging the role of Elizabeth in her 70-year rule, it seemed appropriate to react to the venal low-mindedness that had followed her “African friend” Mandela’s passing, the illicit money involved almost literally riding along on the hearse carrying his body.

The images of Elizabeth’s remains being moved, with throngs standing at roadsides to say their sad farewells to a beloved leader, have been so much like the grief that gripped South Africa, and the world, with Madiba’s death that the comparisons could not be pushed aside.

And it was a deeply depressing realisation: it felt almost as if all that Madiba had done – his wearing of the once hated Springbok rugby jersey, his reaching out across racial lines, his life’s work for his people – had come down to a bunch of clowns, making loot off his demise.

And yet, simultaneously, there remains a faint glimmer of that 'new dawn' for South Africa and its oppressed people, which President Cyril Ramaphosa had promised once his corruption-entangled predecessor Jacob Zuma had been forced out of office by his own party.

The evidence was that self-same broadcast item: culprits in the rampaging spree of public looting, hardly paralleled anywhere in post-colonial countries, were being brought to book, albeit belatedly.

It may appear that Madiba's hopes for a country of prosperous and materially more equal South Africans have been all but dashed. The ANC is at war with itself over factions wanting to hark back to the honour and respect of the Mandela era and those wishing to forget about past corruption and wanting merely to steal more under a banner of ‘radical economic transformation’.

But the string of senior figures appearing in huddled groups in the dock of late – as the anti-corruption drive promised by Ramaphosa rolls slowly round, delayed two years by the Covid pandemic – shows that this country still has a real shot at creating a much more equitable society, as free as possible of racism and other forms of prejudice between people.

ANC Factionalism 

Hope for such is slowly and grudgingly being reborn among South Africans, who have begun to see real progress towards that promised 'new dawn' of equality and prosperity for all.

The ANC, despite much internal pressure from the faction backing Zuma, has ‘stood by’ its ‘stand aside’ rule, requiring persons accused in criminal matters to step down from their posts, thereby removing corrupt elements, or those against whom there is viable evidence of such, from public life.

No longer those ‘with connections’ buying million-dollar fancy cars and living in equally expensive and luxuriously plush houses, supposedly but not actually paid for with civil servant salaries, without having to answer for that.

Once considered among the world’s best tax-collecting agencies, the SA Revenue Service (SARS) was deliberately defanged and made a lapdog of former president Zuma, mainly because of Zuma’s own tax woes, with many years’ of undeclared income to answer for, and because the agency was closing in on some of those directly funding Zuma, according to detailed investigative research.

But SARS has been retrieved from Zuma loyalists, is being rebuilt, has recovered about $17 billion more in revenues than forecast, and has just announced that it has found about $30 million in only 25 lifestyle audits of ‘politically exposed’ persons.

In many small steps and some large, the man Mandela chose as his successor, but who was passed over, now has control of most of the centres of power in the ANC, and looks on course to hold its highest office for a second term as he gradually gets the country back on course.

'Right Direction'

Taken together, these elements paint a picture of South Africa, post-Zuma and post-Covid, finally moving in the 'right direction'.

The big unanswered question is the Phala Phala 'controversy', in which, it is claimed, a buffalo was sold for about $560,000 to a businessman from Chad who paid in cash. The money was weirdly hidden in furniture on Ramaphosa’s game farm and stolen in February 2020 by a group of mostly Namibians.

The question is whether Ramaphosa himself stands any legal liability. If so, the pro-Zuma faction, or at least the party’s anti-Ramaphosa elements, will have won.

Then it will be anyone’s guess where South Africa goes, though many are betting that without Ramaphosa at the helm, this country is headed directly towards the edge, and failed-state conditions.

The great irony is that, especially for the ANC’s political opponents, the absence of Ramaphosa will leave the party deeply vulnerable at the polls, but with him, it is much stronger, the man being significantly more popular than the party.

Those opposing the ANC, but wanting a brighter future for South Africa, privately acknowledge this reality, and that the country’s best chance of achieving what once seemed only a dawn away lies with Ramaphosa keeping his job, come the year-end ANC elective conference.

Without Ramaphosa at the helm, there is little confidence in any other ANC leader on the scene at any level.

Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala problem aside, he is still seen among non-ANC supporters and, importantly, foreign investors as the ANC’s only hope of leading the SA economy back onto its feet in good time – the latest Q2 GDP performance being unpromising at - 0.7 percent, off an unimpressive Q1 GDP number of 1.9 percent.

What the party of Madiba does when it next chooses its leadership, in little more than a couple months, may well determine South Africa’s trajectory – towards either disaster or something like what Mandela might have hoped for when he wanted Ramaphosa to take over from him.

Chris Erasmus is a veteran correspondent and commentator on South Africa and the sub-Saharan region and has been the Nation Media Group’s correspondent for 25 years. This is his personal view as a long-time observer of Southern African events.