Fiyah pon mandela

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What about Gandhi who also advocated forgiveness and last I checked Jesus wasn't African? So you would have been in favour of a blood bath? How would that have served South Africa?

wat do yuh meen bye "in favour of blood bath?"

didd yuh studee a principled mandela ann wat imm sed wen dem trii fe gitt imm fe bow? mandela bowed wen imm cared more bout imself dan imm peeps ann dat y imm was such a weak ann ineffective leader woo cood ann did natt improve da economic condition aff imm peeps

[Tropicana]

wat do yuh meen bye "in favour of blood bath?"

Sorry I don't know how to say that in bluspeak. Do you speak any other languages so that I can try one of them.

didd yuh studee a principled mandela ann wat imm sed wen dem trii fe gitt imm fe bow? mandela bowed wen imm cared more bout imself dan imm peeps ann dat y imm was such a weak ann ineffective leader woo cood ann did natt improve da economic condition aff imm peeps

Here is the deal, Mandela should have seen that those who brutalized and abused Black people under apartheid were brought to justice. But negotiating with the business sector was not "bowing" as you put it or a sign of weakness. It was the smart thing to do. He should have built in some strong terms like equity, contributions to scholarship funds and educational programmes to upgrade the skills of Black youth, etc.

So do I think he did everything he could have and should have...no. But, he is a man, one man and not perfect. There is much work still to be done but I don't see the ANC doing it. From the one experience I had with a South African client, I wasn't impressed.

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Nelson Mandela’s Long Death



As Nelson Mandela lay for nine months near death, the world got an education on his legacy – including the scope of the deal that he and his African National Congress comrades cut to abandon the Freedom Charter. Blacks got the vote, and little else, while whites held on to economic power. Imperialism got a new lease on life in Africa.


Nelson Mandela’s Long Death
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“A straight line could now be drawn connecting the ANC’s early Nineties pact with capital and the massacre of 34 striking Black miners at Marikana, in August, 2012.”

Had Nelson Mandela gone quickly to the grave when a lung infection recurred in March of this year, the world might not have experienced such a fantastic volume of political obituaries on his legacy. The nine-month deathwatch, culminating in an unprecedented send-off by nearly 100 heads of state, provided the space and time for a global examination of, not only the great man’s personal saga, but the tragic trajectory of the South African liberation struggle. Mandela’s long death became a wake, at which the body of his life’s work – and that of his comrades in the African National Congress (ANC) – was on display for collective view, commentary, and assessment.

When a dying Black man is lavished with praise by virtually all the imperial villains of the world, that is news, indeed. As corporate journalists wrote, and then rewrote, their obituaries for the still breathing Mandela, they revisited the critical period when a real revolutionary transformation was averted in South Africa through the miraculous ministrations of “Madiba.” For the first time, the “mainstream” media explored the terms of the deal that was struck to reconcile the demands of global capital and the white minority with the aspirations of the Black majority. Thus, a discussion that had previously been largely limited to the financial pages, on one hand, and left publications like this one, on the other, became far more general.

In the dimming twilight of Mandela’s life, the actual history of the “transition” to Black rule was illuminated for the larger public. A straight line could now be drawn connecting the ANC’s early Nineties pact with capital and the massacre of 34 striking Black miners at Marikana, in August, 2012. Foreign audiences could now understand how Cyril Ramaphosa, a former mine workers union leader, a deputy president of the ANC (and presidential contender), became a billionaire board member of the corporation that owns the Marikana mine. South Africa’s 2011 United Nations vote in favor of a no-fly zone over Libya, ultimately resulting in the murder of Muammar Gaddafi, a great supporter of the armed struggle against the white regime, makes perfect sense in the context of Mandela’s and the ANC’s capitulation to imperialism, two decades earlier.

”His living aura was a prophylactic against serious analysis of the ANC’s abandonment of the 1955 Freedom Charter.”

For non-South Africans, especially, Mandela was the personification of the ANC and the embodiment of the South African struggle. His living aura was a prophylactic against serious analysis of the ANC’s abandonment of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which called for redistribution of the country’s land and nationalization of the mines and banks. When death began to hover, this spring, Mandela’s aura was insufficient to limit the scope of the thousands of political obituaries that were being prepared for distribution.

Ronnie Kasrils, a former fighter in the ANC’s armed wing who became intelligence minister under Black rule and served as a high official in both the ANC and the South African Communist Party, broke the silence in June. “From 1991 to 1996 the battle for the ANC's soul got under way, and was eventually lost to corporate power,” he wrote in an article for the Guardian. “We were entrapped by the neoliberal economy – or, as some today cry out, we ‘sold our people down the river.’"

Kasrils, known as “Red Ronnie,” is white. Now that the “deal” is common knowledge, there are attempts to blame it on white communists – to absolve Mandela in much the same way as Black Obama apologists claim that his white advisors tricked or pressured their icon into pursuing anti-Black, reactionary policies. But the communists, who were multi-racial, and the ANC (also multi-racial) were thoroughly commingled in the South African leadership; they share responsibility for the betrayal of the revolution. “An ANC-Communist party leadership eager to assume political office (myself no less than others) readily accepted this devil's pact, only to be damned in the process,” said Kasrils. “It has bequeathed an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the plight of most of our people.”

”The communists and the ANC share responsibility for the betrayal of the revolution.”

On Democracy Now! last week, host Amy Goodman repeatedly tried to get Kasrils to acknowledge or admit that Nelson Mandela had been a member of the South African Communist Party’s Central Committee. Kasrils said he would have known if that had been the case, and accepts Mandela’s denial of membership. But Goodman’s pursuit of the matter avoids the central fact of Kasril’s testimony: that the leading figures in the commingled ANC, SACP and COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) all endorsed or acquiesced to the “sell-out.”

If the Nineties capitulation had been engineered by a small clique in the leadership, then one could blame the debacle on a few individuals. But the whole forward motion of the South African revolution was turned around, so that when John Pilger interviewed Mandela shortly after he assumed the presidency, he is told the course is irreversible. “…for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy,” said Mandela.

To make sure that the capitalist road was irreversible, the deal included the near-instant creation of a Black business class hopelessly tied to international capital – like Cyril Ramaphosa and other high ranking ANC members – which would provide the African social base for capital’s continued political dominance of the country. When South Africa rises up, once again – and it will – the poor will have to cut and hack their way through this new class of Black compradors. They, too, are Mandela’s children.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/nelson-mandela%E2%80%99s-long-death

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Eyewitness to America’s Betrayal of Mandela’s South Africa: The Gore-Mbeki Commission – Part II



The author learned first hand how the U.S. collaborated with white Afrikaners in Nelson Mandela’s new government to accept unwanted private sector programs. A Black administration was in place, but the Freedom Charter was a dead letter. “Mandela and his colleagues were aware that moving forward to implement the Charter would be considered an act of aggression against global capital.”


Eyewitness to America’s Betrayal of Mandela’s South Africa: The Gore-Mbeki Commission – Part II
by BAR editor and columnist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo

”The ANC had been trapped through its commitments to international monetary organizations whose goals were in complete opposition to the Freedom Charter.”

As the Executive Secretary for the Gore-Mbeki Commission Environment Committee, I sat at the negotiating table while the newly elected government of Nelson Mandela formulated its environmental policies. This position provided a unique vantage point for an African-American woman who had marched in front of the South African embassy against apartheid. I was privy to both the US and South African dialogues. I observed that EPA managers felt a solidarity with white Afrikaner officials and were suspicious of the new African National Congress (ANC) leadership. From conversations with colleagues from other departments, I learned that this EPA/Afrikaner solidarity was widespread. The US was giving lip service to the Mandela government while back channeling support to the old-guard Afrikaner hard-liners.

From that perspective in 1998, it was hard to see how the horrific economic situation in South Africa would be any different with the US and the global community fighting to maintain the status quo. Today, largely owing to the success of having bolstered the status quo, there is a 50% unemployment rate among African youth, white families possess five times the income of black families, continued multinational corporate control of the economy and the mining sector, African Economic disenfranchisement—and most notably—the abandonment of the Freedom Charter.

I observed former South African Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs General Bantu Holomisa and his predecessor, the late Deputy Minister Peter Mokaba, valiantly resist US determination to re-define the goals of the Gore-Mbeki Commission from one of humanitarian assistance to a private sector feeding frenzy. In public meetings, the US/EPA was most accommodating but behind closed doors a different strategy was in play. Although I was the Executive Secretary of the environment committee, EPA—without my knowledge—dispatched a white EPA official to South Africa to consult with former apartheid leaders and to enlist their help in opening markets to the US private sector. The EPA official, in an unclassified memo, lays out the problems posed by Black South African Department of Environment and Tourism (DEAT) officials concerning EPA’s private sector proposal:

“The US was giving lip service to the Mandela government while back channeling support to the old-guard Afrikaner hard-liners.”

“As you are aware, DEAT (ANC) officials have been resistant to the co-operative agreements we have signed with the US Environmental Training Institute…They have raised concerns that the involvement of the US private sector in these programs threatens the development of South Africa’s fledgling environmental industry and would do more to increase US exports than achieve South African environmental and economic goals.”

The memo indicates that EPA through back channels had contacted Afrikaners still operating inside the Environment Department (per a negotiated agreement) and requested guidance as to how to proceed. The memo also informed EPA that whites inside the Department had been identified who would work with US officials to advance US economic interests. The paternal relationship between the US and the minority whites in South Africa was still operational although forced underground in the immediate aftermath of South Africa’s independence. An EPA official was dispatched to South Africa to collude with Afrikaners and develop a strategy to pressure the new Mandela government to open its economy to US environmental industries. This information was confirmed in court testimony during my 2000 trial in which I prevailed. (Carol Browner v. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo 2000)

A sympathetic colleague observing the fireworks between me and the agency on its back channel dealings with former apartheid officials anonymously slid a document under my office door. I had not been copied on it. The memo stated that a colleague and I were not in support of EPA’s back channel dealings with apartheid era holdovers—clearly signaling that we could not be trusted with sensitive information and that we would oppose efforts by the US government to pressure South Africa to accept unfavorable private sector programs. Recall that Gore-Mbeki was suppose to provide humanitarian assistance:

“Kathy Washington and Marsha Coleman-Adebayo have expressed concerns that moving ahead with these programs outside the Gore-Mbeki framework could undercut other work they are planning with DEAT under Gore-Mbeki.”

Despite concerns voiced by the ANC in which they opposed US private sector initiatives, the EPA sent officials to South Africa to strategize with Afrikaner old guards still operating inside the Mandela government and devised a plan to impose pressure points from both inside the South African government and outside from the US.

”An EPA official was dispatched to South Africa to collude with Afrikaners and develop a strategy to pressure the new Mandela government to open its economy to US environmental industries.”

EPA was not operating in isolation from the US and the global community. The goal was to strengthen the long-terms allies of the US government, namely the white hang-overs from the apartheid regime and to seek “friendly” allies within the new ANC government that might be amenable to US economic (and ultimately their personal) interest.

What tragic challenge confronted the ANC as they attempted to implement the Freedom Charter immediately post independence:

“Want to redistribute land? Impossible – at the last minute, the negotiators agreed to add a clause to the new constitution that protects all private property, making land reform virtually impossible. Want to create jobs for millions of unemployed workers? Can’t – hundreds of factories were actually about to close because the ANC had signed on to the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organization (WTO), which made it illegal to subsidize the auto plants and textile factories. Want to get free AIDS drugs to the townships? That violates an intellectual property rights commitment under the WTO, which the ANC joined with no public debate as a continuation of the GATT. “Naomi Klein,The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The ANC had been trapped through its commitments to international monetary organizations whose goals were in complete opposition to the Freedom Charter. The South African Freedom Charter—penned by thousands of South Africans under the vicious oppression of white supremacy—expressed the deepest goals and visions of a new South Africa. Adopted on June 26, 1955 at the Congress of the People, the Freedom Charter begins with the declaration: “The People Shall Govern!" The declaration demands that:

“The People Shall Share in the Country’s Wealth – The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people, the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people. The Land Shall be Shared Among Those Who Work It! Restrictions and land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger.”

Mandela must have understood the difference between fighting a national liberation struggle and fighting the forces of global capital. Had he attempted to implement the Freedom Charter, he would have had a target on his back and his name would still be on the US terrorist list. Mandela and his colleagues were aware that moving forward to implement the Charter would be considered an act of aggression against global capital. They decided to adopt neo-liberal economic policies that have exploded the inequalities within South Africa. In fact, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, signaling a complete surrender to the demands of global capital, referred to himself as a “Thatcherite”– identifying himself with the conservative economic policies of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who was a critic of Mandela and the ANC.

It is hoped that with the passing of Mandela, a new generation of Black South Africans will re-commit to the spirit and implementation of the Freedom Charter’s declaration: “The People Shall Govern.” Without a re-distribution of wealth and the nationalization of the banking and mining sectors, poverty among Black people will continue to spiral out of control and another generation of Black South Africans will continue to suffer exploitation as cheap labor. For my part, I blew the whistle on the EPA looking the other way while a US multinational corporation subjected South African vanadium mine workers to lethal working conditions. Anything less would have betrayed the blood sacrifice of countless everyday people who gave their lives for freedom in South Africa.

Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA is available through amazon.com and the National Whistleblower Center. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered vanadium mine workers. Marsha's successful lawsuit lead to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). She is Director of Transparency and Accountability for the Green Shadow Cabinet.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/eyewitness-america%E2%80%99s-betrayal-mandela%E2%80%99s-south-africa-gore-mbeki-commission-%E2%80%93-part-ii

iff oonnoo waan read part I

Eyewitness to America Betraying Mandela's South Africa: The Gore-Mbeki Commission

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20597-eyewitness-to-america-betraying-mandelas-south-africa-the-gore-mbeki-commission

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Nelson Mandela, Free Market Capitalism and the South African Crisis


Anthony Monteiro

The veil must be lifted from the deliberations and machinations that led Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to discard the people’s Freedom Charter in favor of an accommodation with white capital, in the early Nineties. Why, at South Africa’s most critical juncture, did the ANC make a pact with the Devil? And why did they keep it?


Nelson Mandela, Free Market Capitalism and the South African Crisis
by Anthony Monteiro

“The decision against nationalization has left the people worse off than when Mandela was elected in 1994.”

Why and when did Mandela change his mind about nationalization of the wealth of South Africa? And what have been the results? I find the mainstream media’s accounts, citing Mandela’s claim that he changed his mind at Davos, Switzerland, in 1992 implausible. More troubling is why when Mandela and the ANC led government saw things going so badly for the people they didn’t change course? These questions arise as we try to make sense of Mandela’s legacy. This is especially important in light of the catastrophic crisis of poverty, hunger, unemployment, education and health care besetting the South African people. The decision against nationalization has left the people worse off than when Mandela was elected in 1994. White economic privilege remains the same, and their wealth exponentially increased, a tiny, rich and mostly parasitic black bourgeoisie and a black middle class have been created. For 90 percent of the African population things have not improved.

The New York Times reported on December 10 that Nelson Mandela’s change of thinking occurred at Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum (the annual meeting of the major bankers, capitalist, entrepreneurs, celebrities, politicians and intellectuals tied to the neo liberal globalist model of the world economy) in January 1992. Tito Mboweni, a former governor of the South African Reserve Bank (that nation’s Central Bank), who accompanied Mandela to Davos, says when Mandela and the ANC delegation arrived Mandela had a speech written by the ANC that focused on nationalization. Mboweni says “we discussed this at some length and decided that its content was inappropriate for a Davos audience.” Mboweni drafts another speech that was friendly to the Davos crowd. The speech was vague and filled with clichés and platitudes and assured the audience that they had nothing to fear from Mandela or the ANC.

In a letter to the Sunday Independent last January Mboweni says it was meetings with representatives of the Communist parties of China and Vietnam that changed Madiba’s mind completely. According to Mboweni the Chinese and Vietnamese told Mandela “We are currently striving to privatize state enterprises and invite private enterprise into our economies. We are Communists Party governments, and you are a leader of a national liberation movement. Why are you talking about nationalization?” According to Anthony Sampson, the author of Mandela: The Authorized Biography, Mandela told him “They changed my views altogether. I came home to say: ‘Chaps we have to choose. We either keep nationalization and get no investment, or we modify our own attitude and get investment.’”

”The path to Mandela’s radical change of mind involved more than conversations during a five-day meeting in Davos in 1992.”

It is obvious that the ANC, the South African national liberation struggle and the nation as a whole were at a critical juncture. They were faced with problems of consolidating political power and moving the nation towards economic emancipation. On the other side, the white regime and its backers in the West were concerned with making concessions to black South Africans that would not disturb western corporate control of this mineral rich and strategically located economy. However I find the accounts of Mr. Sampson and Mr. Mboweni implausible. In other words, the path to Mandela’s radical change of mind involved more than conversations during a five-day meeting in Davos in 1992.

The first question is about the representatives of China and Vietnam. Both nations in 1992 were at different levels of economic development. Vietnam was still in the social and economic reconstruction phase after 25 years of war against foreign aggression. China was a socialist economy that twelve years earlier had entered upon a path of reform within its socialist economy. China at that time had about 80 to 90% of the strategic parts of its economy under state control. Vietnam was similar with the state controlling economic reconstruction. Even today close to 70% of China’s economy is under state control. The most technologically dynamic and profitable sector of the Chinese economy is the state, or nationalized sector. The facts are that China and Vietnam are heavily state dominated economies and each says the objective of their economic planning is to build advanced socialism. Even if we accept that the Chinese and Vietnamese representatives at Davos said what Mboweni says, the next question is who were they and did they represent the official positions of their governments? If we accept the mainstream media’s accounts, they must have been saying, “do as we say, not as we do.” Of course this would have been an instance of unbelievable bad faith, even cynicism. But on this matter, rather than looking to the Chinese and Vietnamese delegates, I think we should question Mr. Mboweni ‘s and Mr. Sampson’s account.

The second point is that when Mandela emerges from prison two of his and the ANC’s most important allies were Cuba and Libya, two nations whose economies were heavily nationalized. Why did Mandela not consult Fidel Castro and Muammar Gadaffi among others to get a more complete view on how well nationalization was working or not working in their nations?

”The decisions made by Mandela and the ANC thwarted a robust transition and allowed the old system to remain pretty much intact.”

The third point, any nation emerging from a long period of civil war and national liberation, experiencing a radical transfer of power, necessarily goes through a period of transition. It is ludicrous to think that sober minds, especially those with the training of most of the ANC, could underestimate a transition where something like a New Deal for the people, including a jobs and infrastructure programs, an anti-poverty crusade, health care, housing and political education, would not be considered necessary. No clear thinking person could have imagined an overnight great leap forward from a ravaged apartheid economy to an advanced socialist one. There would be a transition period of at least a decade where the groundwork would be laid for a new democratic and socialist economy. The forms of this transition would have many layers, even ambiguities, but its direction would be firmly established and based on the Freedom Charter and its call for nationalization. The decisions made by Mandela and the ANC thwarted a robust transition and allowed the old system to remain pretty much intact and thereby recklessly undermined the future of South Africa.

The more plausible scenario, from my perspective, is that Mandela and a small circle around him, long before Davos, perhaps in the last year or so of Mandela’s imprisonment, cut a deal. As we know Mandela entered into secret talks with the white regime before being released. These talks were kept secret from the ANC leadership. There were others in and outside of the ANC who were involved in secret talks about the economy well before 1990. By the time Mandela is released an agreement had been reached with the regime against nationalization. The question for Mandela and those in the ANC who supported him, was to get an appropriate time and place for Mandela to announce his change of position. There had to also be a plausible explanation of why such a drastic change. The Davos story fulfills both requirements, an appropriate place and a plausible story.

The fact that Mr. Mboweni, a free market capitalist, accompanied Mandela to Davos and had such power that he was allowed to trash the ANC speech and substitute for it his own, should raise further troubling questions about the behind scenes operations among the ANC elite. Why weren’t other views present in the ANC delegation at Davos? Or were they dismissed as “too radical” even before Davos?

”By the time Mandela is released an agreement had been reached with the regime against nationalization.”

Not long after the Davos announcement the ANC (or the free market and neo liberal elements within the ANC) announced that the first black government would assume the entire debt of the white regime. A sum of close to $25 billion. The ANC took an IMF loan to pay the debt, which came with severe strings attached that protected white control of the post apartheid economy. (see my article in BAR Dec 11 2013 for a further discussion of this). Mandela’s claim that he was turned around at Davos is questionable and his turn against the Freedom Charter and the aspirations of the masses of South Africa (who cherished the Freedom Charter as their manifesto of freedom and reflective of their freedom aspirations) is problematic.

Winnie Mandela has said repeatedly that when Mandela emerged from prison he was not the same man. She says his revolutionary resolve was different. What she probably meant is his change of heart on economic policy and his willingness to, as she saw it, make unnecessary compromises with white South Africans and Western interests. Ronnie Kasrils, former minister in ANC governments, a member of the ANC executive and a leader of Umkonto weSizwe recently wrote (The Guardian, June 23, 2013) that the decision against nationalization was a “Faustian bargain” with the white world that sold out the South African poor. Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine suggests the bargain was that in return for the ANC turning against The Freedom Charter and nationalization, the West would make Mandela a living saint.

In my BAR article “Nelson Mandela, The Contradictions of his Life and Legacies” I argue there are four stages in Mandela’s life. The fourth is 1990 to 2013. This is the most contradictory in terms of his previous revolutionary activity. However, it is as significant to understanding his legacy and life as the previous ones are. The burning question is in power what did he and his ANC colleagues do to liberate the nation from economic apartheid and foreign corporate control. At this point the answer is in power the ANC failed. The problem is not important only to South Africans or Africans, but for how humanity, especially its impoverished and destitute majority, imagines the future world and how we fight for it.

Anthony Monteiro is a professor of African American Studies at Temple University.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/nelson-mandela-free-market-capitalism-and-south-african-crisis