Replying Mwenda: Why Mandela's legacy edges ahead

In January of 2014, the maverick Ugandan Journalist Mwenda Mujuni, founder and administrator of the Kampala based Independent Media Publications; a man I greatly respect for his incisive, candid exposition of issues of rounded political and social relevance, made a case on why late South-African President and global political and moral icon - Nelson Mandela’s legacy is not quite as ‘super-human’ and angelic as many commentators, fans and critiques alike have touted it to be.

In his speech and writing, Mwenda made a number of well-referenced and plausible arguments for how other African leaders have often replicated and even surpassed Mandela’s actions – at least the ones particularly responsible for marking him out as a leader without peer on the continent and a saintly figure the world over.

Now, while I don’t in any way explicitly disagree with the moral depth or admirable quality of the actions Mwenda points out as qualifying other African leaders for the same approbation Mandela has received, the purpose of this response is to attempt and point out how fundamentally structural Mandela’s decisions were, such as his conciliatory attitude towards the minority white government in South Africa responsible for preventing South Africa’s descent into a racial blood-bath or from becoming like the modern-day economic ‘hell’ of Zimbabwe, were, in comparison to the, in my view, quite superficial and more parochial decisions of other African and/or Third-world leaders that Mwenda effectively equates to Mandela’s.

Mwenda, in his blog article, http://independent.co.ug/andrewmwenda/?p=667, goes ahead to draw parallels, contrasts and comparisons between Mandela’s legacy-making decisions, in both his personal and official capacities as a human being; Mandela the father, husband and man; then as a leader; first of the African National Congress as a black movement aimed at ending white minority supremacist rule in Apartheid South Africa, then as the first black president of an independent ‘multi-racial’ or non-racial’ South African state; and decisions of other African leaders that may be said to be just as laudable and just as revealing of the leader’s substance and goodness; but in Mwenda’s view – and quite truly – have not attracted as much media attention and global citizens’ approbation as Mandela’s.

While Mwenda begins his article with references to West-African leaders, like Obasanjo of Nigeria, and Afrifa and Rawlings of Ghana; he slowly and deliberately zeroes down to two leaders he has been most closely connected with, East-African Presidents Yoweri and Kagame of Uganda and Rwanda respectively.

It is neither relevant to this article, nor is it my desire to speculate on why Mwenda chooses these two out of all other African leaders.

A less optimistic mind would quickly buy into the less factual and more sinister claims of influence-peddling and sycophancy that seem to haunt the Ugandan public’s perception of Mr. Mwenda’s dealings with these two Chiefs– des- etats, but I’d opine that it is for the simple reason that he has dealt more closely with these two men, and is therefore more familiar with their personalities and therefore the thought-processes and internal workings of government that inform their decision making.

In responding to Mr. Mwenda therefore, the approach of this piece will be to examine, piecemeal, the two key issues he points out, and which indeed form the basis of Mandela’s praise-worthy personality and leadership style, and offer a more in-depth analysis and explanation for how Mandela’s decisions tower significantly over any other of their ‘like’ that may be attributed to either Uganda’s Yoweri or Rwanda’s Kagame, and any other African leader for that matter;

One - the lack of a retributive and vengeful personality, which Mwenda refers to as ‘magnanimity’, exhibited in Mandela’s conciliatory overtures to the architects and masterminds of the apartheid government in South Africa.

Mwenda argues, effectively, that  Mandela’s apparent goodness to Verwoerd, De Clark and all other of their accomplices in South Africa’s apartheid nightmare, was premised more on political necessity – in not wanting the nation’s economy to collapse through a mass white exodus and therefore make him a failed President -  than on the man’s  intrinsic goodness, as opposed to less politically ‘capital’ acts that have been done by Mr. Museveni , Kagame and others and can only be explained by these men’s intrinsic goodness.

Conversely, Mwenda points out how Museveni has reconciled with erstwhile political nemeses, and been altruistic towards people like Miria Obote – widow to the late Premier Apollo Milton and a key opponent of Museveni, and how Kagame has reconciled with many former functionaries of the Habyarimana government that orchestrated the 1994 ‘Tutsi’ genocide; even where this wasn’t in any way focal to their regime survival and can thus be pegged to the innate magnanimity of the two excellencies.   

What Mwenda fails to examine, however, is that Mandela, even while he was still fighting for an end to the system of apartheid, while he was still an enemy of the state and a black freedom fighter with no official power, was conciliatory to apartheid leadership and committed to a peaceful, egalitarian outcome.

 From the outset, Mandela was opposed to wanton violence, and the use of human life as a means to an end, whether that life belonged to a white or black man; something which cannot be said, for instance, for Egypt's Abdel Nasser who clearly valued ‘Egyptian’ life above ‘Israeli’ life.

In Mandela’s legendary trial, after he had been captured and accused of terrorism against the white government, he is quoted as having made the immortal declaration, ‘‘ Freedom for all South Africans, black and white, is an ideal for which I am prepared to die, but for which, under any circumstance, I am not prepared to kill!’’

Mandela also mentioned, that the Umkonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC, was violent only to the extent that they disrupted and sabotaged physical infrastructure like roads, railways and communication lines that supported the apartheid government’s operation. The group always sought to minimize the level of casualties, whether white or black, and in no way targeted individual whites, civilian or government official, for assassination.

 Ultimately, it is his eventual loyalty to this ideal even after he had won the general election of 1994 and gained political power that makes Mandela stand above others.

It is this ‘irrational’ love of what fellow black South-Africans saw as an obvious enemy that led his long-loyal wife Winnie to divorce Mandela, and turn their daughter in bitterness against him; accusing him of betraying the black cause and loving a people that had brutalized and harassed their family and their people for so many years.

Actually, after becoming President, Mandela had the latitude and justification to renegade on his promise to forgiving the whites – a factor that would, undoubtedly, have helped him extinguish the fires of demand for racial retribution against the historical injustice of South Africa’s white population still burning in the hearts of South Africa’s poor black majority even today; and effectively become popular among the black folk of south Africa who today accuse him of being a sell-out and traitor, as opposed to Zimbabwe’s Mugabe who is hailed as a Pan-African hero despite his economic failings.

Indeed – it may even be said that a failed economy, as long it was black controlled, would have made Mandela more legendary in the eyes of black Africa, as has been the case with Tanzania’s Nyerere and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe.

On the other hand – Museveni, before he gained political power, was a violent guerilla rebel who went as far as using the civilian population in Luwero as a human shield against Obote’s army.

Museveni was neither averse nor opposed to the use of child combatants in his young NRA army, and is actually known to have said, when asked about child-soldiers in his rebel force, that, ''African boys practice violence traditionally with sticks and stones and catapults from an early age – their participation in our war is therefore only an extension of that violence …’’

It would also be important to consider scale. How many individuals did Mandela’s decision affect? How far reaching was the extent of his ‘forgiveness’ to the entire white population of South Africa that had been complicit in perpetrating apartheid against all of South Africa’s black population?

Of course – forgiving one or two enemy associates that come groveling at your feet, is a very politically astute gesture, in a peasant society like ours where the generosity of the godfather buys him a saintly image in the eyes of the ignorant masses.

This is what Museveni has done in reaching out a hand to a few ex-LRA combatants and pardoning men like Chris Rwakasisi after twenty years of incarceration, when they are economically and spiritually jaded, and therefore no threat to him politically.

One wonders why Museveni didn’t act just as magnanimously to his direct foe, Milton Obote, and actually went on record as saying that, ''Obote – who has wild hair that makes him resemble a ghost, will never set foot on Ugandan soil while still alive .. ''

Indeed, Obote remained in exile in Lusaka, and wasn’t even allowed to return after he was old, senile and terminally ill. He died a broken and poor man in exile, simply because Yoweri was bitter at and vindictive towards him.

Finally, on the matter of conciliation, it would help us to examine the nature of justice expended by each of the leaders in question, once they took office.

While Museveni has always opted for outright litigation and forms of criminal-justice that out rightly punish the ‘other side’ for wrongs and iniquities, Mandela and Kagame sought more society-placating means.

Kagame pursued litigation to an extent, especially as far as the leaders of the genocide were concerned, and has been feral in his condemnation of Habyarimana and his immediate functionaries. He only opted for the Gacaca Court System as a recourse to the impracticalities of formal court cases – too many people were ‘guilty’ and there were too few courts and lawyers to prosecute them and so prosecution had to happen outside of the formal system. This, however, was still ‘litigatory’ and aimed at punishing wrong-doers, since Gacaca sends people to jail.

Inversely, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to seek forgiveness and pacify the angry black masses. It wasn’t set up to punish whites or imprison the perpetrators of apartheid, but to get them to apologize to the nation, and  integrate with everyone else.

Now – for the second issue of Mandela’s supposedly iconic legacy;

The lack of greed for power exhibited in Mandela’s decision to hand over Presidential power after only a single term in office.

While many have attributed this to his advanced age, Mandela being nearly seventy years old by the time he took office, and therefore quite exhausted and even sickly from the length of time he spent in custody; in addition to the general economic advancement of South African society that made trivial, barbaric and archaic considerations like ethnicity and tribal identity, religious denomination and personalized control of the armed forces inconsequential; I think that Mandela could have served a longer time and still gone ahead to be famous for exemplary leadership.

Nothing constitutional or ‘circumstantial’ barred Mandela from re-election, since he was still very popular and desired by all South Africans across the political divide, unlike men like J.J Rawlings and Olusegun Ogasanjo who took power to supposedly remove a ‘power-hungry’ leader and thus would have been shooting themselves in the foot by over-staying their welcome.

Actually – I think this is what has been Museveni’s greatest dilemma as a long-serving President, since despite his claims at continued transformation, the world sees him as a self-contradicting liar who is today greedy for power, yet declared in 1986 that, ‘‘Africa’s greatest problem is leaders that overstay in power ..’’

I frankly think Museveni would have an easier time convincing Ugandans that he should stay and ‘complete’ some unfinished business – if he hadn’t made that now infamous statement in 1986 that shoots him in the foot.

As for President Kagame, time will tell, 2017 is only a couple of years away - though nothing makes the brutal and unapologetic assassination of political opponents justifiable, as we witnessed in the last Rwandan presidential election, especially for a president that claims to be as popular as Mr. Kagame does.

I mean – a lion never apologizes to the zebra for being a carnivore. He’s just having supper.

                                                                       ǁ   SURUMANI   ǁ