Did Mandela Sell Out the Blacks

On the occasion of Mandela’s 94^th birthday, a number of Black people, particularly those who were either very young or not yet born in 1994, have taken the opportunity to castigate him for the ‘failed negotiations’ that brought the Black majority Government to power.  They base this criticism largely on the fact that he did not enforce the requirements of the Freedom Charter.

The Freedom Charter is a document that was motivated to a large extent by the principles of Marxism, as interpreted by Josef Stalin.  The Russian Communists and their allies, particularly China, Cuba and East Germany, were strongly instrumental in supporting the Freedom Movements, including the ANC, and certainly had considerable influence in determining the details of their objectives and goals.  Any objective reading of the Freedom Charter will reveal the strong influences of the Stalinist philosophy and ideology.  It is noteworthy that several leaders of the ANC leading up to the adoption of the Freedom Charter were strongly against any association of the movement with the Communists,

The rightness or otherwise of these philosophies and ideology is clearly shown by the rapid and abject collapse of the Communist States following 1989.  That collapse demonstrated clearly what any realist would have known for years – Communism, as it was practiced by the Russian State, was not economically viable, it was not capable of delivering the promises it made to the people, and it was a destroyer of people.  The tyranny of Adolph Hitler was almost a blip in history in comparison with that of Josef Stalin, who was responsible for the death of over thirty million of his people!  Anyone who has visited a Communist State cannot fail to have been horrified by the abject condition in which most of the people live.  Cuba can hardly be claimed to be an economic Paradise for the workers!  East Germany, one of the world’s major industrial areas before the Second World War, was dragged down under the tyranny of the Communist dictatorship to a level that required the investment of hundreds of billions of Euros in bringing it to the standards that West Germany achieved in only a couple of decades after the end of that war!  Only now is a large part of Europe starting to recover from the depredations of Communism, nearly a quarter of a century after the demise of that abhorrent system.

The behaviour of the Communists in the brutal repression of the Polish uprising of 1956, in which the Army gunned down 400 people in a peaceful protest for human rights, is surely indicative of a total lack of interest in the rights of the people, one of the great achievements of the change in the political scene in South Africa in 1994.  That is the behaviour that one would expect from Robert Mugabe’s brutal regime.  Similar behaviour was exhibited in Czechoslovakia, when a fear in the Kremlin of the consequences of the free flow of information within the country led to an invasion of the country by the Warsaw Pact on 25^th August 1968 and a replacement of the leaders of the Communist satellite State.  Is that what the critics of the negotiations of Mandela leading up to 1994 would want for their own country? 

Even China, the other major supporter of the ‘freedom fight’ did not provide that support because it was ‘good’ in the abstract.  The motivation of the Chinese leadership was clearly to obtain a preferential position in the country, a treasure house of minerals and agriculture, both producing goods sorely needed by China.  The Marxism practiced by the Communist leadership has proven to be as ineffective a system as that of Russia, and the methods of control of the populace applied by the Chinese Government was as brutal as that of Stalin.  The changes that China has made, in the direction of capitalism, has enabled that country to make the giant steps forward that it has achieved in the past decades, and the final moves away from the remnants of Communism are now in the process of happening.

The particular matters that the complainants refer to are the clauses dealing with the nationalisation of the banks, the mines and the land.  Each of these elements are clearly policies advocated by Marx, in the naïve belief that the State will provide a better living for the people than would any form of capitalism.  This has not happened anywhere in the world, and there is no reason to believe that a move in this direction would achieve any better situation for the citizens of South Africa.  On the contrary, there are numerous indications that the tentative steps that the ANC has taken in the direction desired by the complainants has resulted in a marked decline in the productivity of the assets.  A clear example is the restitution of farmland, in which proof abounds that the transfer of farmland from productive White farmers to Black ownership has resulted in a virtually complete collapse of the farming activity on that land.  The same picture emerges in Zimbabwe, where the ‘indigenisation’ of land has produced a food crisis unparalleled in its history.  The operation of mines by the State in South Africa has resulted in a demonstration of incompetence.  The bank business of Postnet can also surely not be held up as a shining example of effective operation!  The inability of Eskom to provide electricity to the country at reasonable cost has resulted in soaring cost for the product.  Management within the utility and within the Government is entirely responsible for this.  The incapability of the Department of Basic Education, although endowed with an annual Budget more than three times the per capita average for developed countries, to deliver textbooks within six months after the start of the school year, not to speak of providing a competent education to the children, must surely point to the incapability of the State to perform adequately.

The moral of all of this is clear – the Communist-inspired ideals of the Freedom Charter, although enticing on the surface, do not stand up well in the rigorous testing of the real world!

Nelson Mandela is a man of great ideals.  He had, fortunately, the opportunity and the mental fortitude to examine these ideals in the light of experience, his own as well as that of many South African greats like Harry Oppenheimer, and to modify those ideals in such a way that they would be able to survive in the world in which we live.  For that, and for the fact that Nelson Mandela survived the conditions he was forced to endure by a semi-Fascist Government, is something for which all South Africans, and all citizens of the world, should be grateful. 

Now is the time in which we live.  If anything should have been done differently in 1994, we should recognise that it was not, and that it now will not be done differently, and build on what now is fact.