Before he was sentenced in November 1962, I attended Nelson Mandela's trial in Pretoria with the journalist from New Age, Philippa Levy, with whose husband Norman I later served a prison sentence in Pretoria.

Setting out from our homes in Johannesburg, we travelled to and from the trial in Ruth First's car, with Philippa - then heavily pregnant with her and Norman's child - the driver.

Not long after we left Pretoria in rush hour at the end of the day's hearing, and in a long line of fast-moving traffic heading to Johannesburg, we were rammed very powerfully from behind, and shot across the road into a ditch on the other side, narrowly escaping being hit by oncoming cars.

Was it an accident? Or was it attempted murder by the Security Police, two decades before they really did kill Ruth?

Very shortly afterwards, New Age was banned. When Philippa and I talked about the matter a few months ago, at the cremation of a dear South African friend, we agreed we couldn't tell.

What I do know - having worked afterwards with Ruth First in underground journalism for the ANC, the South African Communist Party and Umkhonto we Sizwe - is that Ruth would have been outraged at the democratic fraud which has been left to South Africa as the most negative element of Nelson Mandela's legacy.

In a strange way, the fraudulent joker who pretended to be making sign language for deaf people while eminent mourners spoke their solemnities at Mandela's memorial celebration at FNB Stadium in Soweto on Tuesday told a telling truth, showing up South Africa before the whole world, and making a travesty both of the country and what should have been a solemn occasion.

Yes, South Africa's democracy is a fraud, just like the sign language joker, with South Africa's tens of millions of black voters - together with the whole electorate - denied the most crucial democratic right enjoyed previously by white voters under apartheid: the power of holding each individual politician accountable, of selecting them individually and getting rid of them individually if they are useless, corrupt, unreliable, oppressive, or whatever.

When the death of Nelson Mandela was announced on 5 December, the most important truth told about the country he left behind - in the billions of words spoken and in print -was by a professor at a highly respected university in Canada, and published the same day in an article in the Montreal Gazette, under the heading: "After Mandela: South Africa's democratic challenge."

Ruth First was wholly opposed to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (in opposition to her husband, Joe Slovo, on this, as on other matters), and I think she would have agreed with that phrase about "South Africa's democratic challenge." I think she would have agreed that the stranglehold of the party-list system is a crucial matter for correction in South Africa after the death of her friend and colleague, who more than any other was both war-leader and peace-maker in the 30 years following the Sharpeville massacre.

The words for South Africa to consider come from Professor Philip Oxhorn, professor of political science and director of the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University in Montreal. His reflections on the death of the founding president of democratic South Africa are set out below. The conclusion follows directly from his analysis:

"As the world reflects on how to honour the memory of such a great leader", he writes, " it is important to consider what South Africans might do to ensure that his legacy is not undermined by social and political dynamics beyond the control of any individual. This is South Africa's democratic challenge. It requires that South Africa's leaders collectively re-engage with the country's citizens, in much the same way that Mandela and the African National Congress under his leadership did to achieve the monumental changes they brought about almost 20 years ago.

"At its root, this democratic challenge stems from high levels of poverty, compounded by growing levels of inequality. While poverty has declined since the 1994 democratic transition, it remains well above 20 per cent nationally, and is concentrated among the black and coloured populations. The same is generally true for persistently high levels of unemployment, which averaged 23.8 per cent between 2007 and 2010. Like poverty, however, unemployment is unevenly distributed, affecting 45 per cent of males and 53 per cent of females 15 to 24 years of age. More startlingly, South Africa not only remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, but inequality has actually increased since the end of apartheid, particularly among the black population.

"The frustrations generated by this obvious inequity have increasingly exploded in social protests. It is telling that only China can rival the thousands of local protests that have surged in South Africa in recent years. Even more tellingly, the response by government security forces often seems indistinguishable from that of the apartheid era. The violence linked with the 2012 strike at the Lonmin's Marikana Platinum Mine, which left 34 miners dead, is only the most dramatic example.

"State violence in many ways mirrors another consequence of poverty and inequality: high levels of societal violence. For example, the homicide rate of 31.8 per 100,000 people in 2010 was among the highest in the world, even though it was substantially lower than the 1996 peak of 60.4. And like poverty and inequality, such violence is also concentrated in the black and coloured population.

"Growing perceptions of official corruption only compound people's frustration and sense of injustice. The 2011 Afrobarometer public-opinion survey found that 25 per cent of South Africans felt that corruption was a priority issue. This placed corruption among their top five priorities for the first time, ahead of both HIV/AIDS and poverty. An average of 40 per cent felt that public officials across the board, including the president, parliament and the police, were engaged in corruption.

"The point in highlighting the shortcomings of post-apartheid South Africa is not to assess blame, but rather to remind us all of how far the country seems to be moving from the values of fairness, inclusion and democracy that inspired Mandela, and made him the leader he became. South Africa's democratic challenge is in many ways a collective challenge to honour Mandela's legacy by reaffirming those values.

"There is of course no easy solution for achieving this. Much will depend on the willingness of political leaders at all levels to critically reassess their strategies and behaviour. A good starting point, both symbolically and in practical terms, would be electoral reform. In this area too, South Africa represents a paradox. In order to ensure fairness and inclusion, party-list proportional representation was adopted for parliamentary elections. The consequences, despite the best of intentions, have undermined that goal in two ways.

"First, party lists have inverted the loyalty of MPs, making them dependent on political leaders who determined their position on the lists, creating a growing distance between MPs and their constituencies. Second, the overwhelming popular support for the ANC guarantees it an overwhelming majority in parliament, creating a sense of inevitability that further distances it from normal expectations of electoral accountability, at the same time that meaningful opposition risks marginalization.

"While there are no obvious solutions to either electoral reform or South Africa's democratic challenge, searching for them should be seen as an opportunity to begin a national debate - one that is inspired by the same values of inclusion and fairness that inspired Mandela. That, in the end, would be a most fitting recognition of Mandela's true legacy."

Bravo! A luta continua!

The struggle does continue. There is indeed a democratic challenge. No individual political leader, however great, solves all the problems, or provides all the solutions.

Along with the legacy, there is always the legacy unfulfilled.

Along with the achievement, there is deficit. And democratic deficit is the great affliction which prevents South Africa from dealing with the evils set out so clearly by Professor Oxhorn, just as he set out the necessity of electoral reform, if the dream of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela - and countless millions of others - is to be realised.

I have only one quibble with Professor Oxhorn's analysis. South Africa's bad electoral law is even worse than he suggests. He writes that "party lists have inverted the loyalty of MPs, making them dependent on political leaders who determined their position on the lists, creating a growing distance between MPs and their constituencies."

But for the politicians scrambling for access to the National Assembly next year, there are no constituencies (or rather, none of a real kind). The whole country is treated by the electoral law as one single vast Constituency, so that no local ANC branch - or any other local party branch - is able to select for itself a candidate whom it knows and trusts, and can keep an eye on. And which it can de-select ahead of the next election, if that politician proves to be corrupt, or a time-server, or a crony of the power elite, or a failure in any one of the hundred ways in which a politician can fail the people he or she is supposed to represent.

The great need, in terms of Professor Oxhorn's unshakeable analysis, is for South Africa's mainly black electorate to reclaim power for itself, away from the politicians who have usurped it. Electoral power should mean power over the politicians, not the power of politicians over the people.

A new period of democratic struggle lies ahead.

This is the best legacy which President Mandela has bequeathed to the country: a capacity for struggle, so that life follows death.

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