Mandela’s release on February 11, 1990, after 27 years in apartheid-era jails, set in motion the country’s transformation to democracy which culminated in historic all-race elections in 1994 and his inauguration as the country’s first black leader.
Some critics say Mandela’s legacy has been blighted by his successor Thabo Mbeki’s sacking as president by the ruling ANC, and the latest sexual scandal involving current President Jacob Zuma which has damaged the party’s image.
South Africa’s change to democracy has been heralded as a miracle. Mandela’s reconciliation drive won over hardline white conservatives, previously segregated communities are integrated and most blacks and whites now treat each other with respect.
But two decades on, many black South Africans still live in grinding poverty in squalid shantytowns, official unemployment is just under 25 per cent, and analysts say actual joblessness is much higher.
Racial inequality
“The challenges are identical. If there are three categories of things, it will be unemployment, inequality with a racial overlay and poverty. The changes between 1990 and 2010 are not profound,” said independent political analyst Nic Borain.
Crime is rife and South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime. The country also has to deal with one of the heaviest global HIV/Aids caseloads.
Income inequality between different race groups has increased from 1995, and the World Bank describes South Africa as a country with “extreme differences in incomes and wealth”.
At least 34 per cent of South Africa’s estimated 50 million people live on less than two dollars per day, according to the World Bank.
The economy under the African National Congress, which has been ruling since the end of apartheid in 1994, saw its longest spurt of growth on record until the fallout from the global financial crisis pushed it into recession at the start of 2009.
Two decades after Mandela’s release, South Africa needed to put in place real change to address economic structural problems and the low potential growth rate, said Peter Attard Montalto, emerging markets economist at Nomura International.
“There is currently no one to lead South Africa to this consensus. We need to hunt for the next Mandela, not the nation builder, the economic revolutionary,” Attard Montalto added.
Despite the obvious problems facing South Africa, much has changed since Mandela was released.
A strong black middle-class has emerged, a whole generation of schoolchildren born after 1994 — known as the “born frees” — have grown up in an multi-racial society and basic services like water and electricity have been extended to millions.
“The only black people you interacted with (prior to 1990) as a normal kind of person were servants and deeply poverty-stricken people. That is no longer the case and there is a general deracialism of wealth at least,” political analyst Borain said.
Meanwhile, Mr Mandela remains revered the world over but is rarely seen in public. The anti-apartheid icon’s minders jealously guard his privacy in a plush Johannesburg suburb, limiting the increasingly frail 91-year-old’s public engagements.
“We don’t discuss his private life, apart from saying that he sees friends and family and does what other normal retired people do, reads and watches TV,” Achmat Dangor, the chief executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said when asked what South Africa’s former president days’ entail.
Mandela’s release after 27 years in prison kicked off a frenzy of political negotiations with the then apartheid government that led to the end of the system of institutionalised racial discrimination and his becoming South Africa’s first black leader.
The then 71-year-old became the symbol of reconciliation and was seen as the glue holding the country together.
Admired and loved by all South Africans regardless of race, he slowly retreated from the limelight after stepping down as president in 1999.
Mandela occasionally gives an audience to visiting leaders or celebrities, but even these visits have become rare and the foundation is forced every few months to deny reports his health is failing.
The foundation and friends say he is enjoying a well-deserved retirement, but tries to keep up to date with political developments.
“He reads at least four newspapers a day next to his easy chair (and) he watches the news on television,” said George Bizos, the close friend, lawyer and activist who helped defend Mandela in his 1963 treason trial.
But as you would expect for a man in his 90s, his memory is beginning to fade. “He receives old friends. His memory is not very good about recent matters, but it’s very, very good about what happened in the 40s, 50s and 60s and 70s,” Bizos told Reuters.
Mandela’s primary focus is now his family and he steers clear of politics. The ruling ANC’s decision to parade him at a rally ahead of last year’s election was roundly condemned, including by his own foundation.
His influence on the country, though, cannot be underestimated, from his trademark shuffling dance to the famous donning of the Springbok rugby jersey — a symbol of Afrikaner pride — when South Africa won the 1995 rugby World Cup.
Reuters
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