After reading yet another article by Stanley Uys wherein he tries albeit unsuccessfully to dispute the fitting comparison between Jacob Zuma's rise and rise to the union buildings with that of Paul Kruger's, made by Martin Meredith in his book Diamonds, Gold and War I was forced to regress a bit to address an old and laughable piece of naivety by this writer (i.e. Mr Uys).
I want to take everyone down memory lane to a time when Mr Nelson Mandela wasn't a commercial entity that he has become nowadays. This is a period when he had just taken over the reigns from Oliver Tambo in 1991 at the Durban National Conference. Of course, to us in the ANC, Mandela was already known as the father of the nation and as young men and women who had by then not seen Mandela live until his release in April 1990, we used to sing jubilantly, "Nelson Mandela, hhayi! hhayi! Ubaba wethu...".
To us he was already an icon and we always knew that he would be catapulted to succeed Oliver Tambo upon his release and the retirement of OR (as Tambo was affectionately known in exile). Tambo had been regarded as a true statesman and was internationally revered as a builder of bridges and had he not suffered a mild stroke in 1989, he could very well have become our first Black president.
So when his health put paid to such wishes on our part, Mandela who was a logical choice became the ANC president. By virtue of his elevation to the ANC presidency, Mandela was thus tipped to become our future state president after the all inclusive or first democratic elections in 1994. Our white counterparts through the media wrote a lot of negative press about Mandela and such was the animosity shown towards him that the then British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher around 1988 or there about once called Mandela a terrorist.
Fast forward to the current day icon that Mandela eventually became in the eyes of his fiercest critics, after a series of commercialisation successes, some people now want to own and claim Mandela as their entity. It is hypocritical of the media and people of Stanley Uys' ilk to now want to own Mandela yet back then they called him a criminal in reference to his 27 year jail time in Robben Island. They questioned how this country could be run by a "jail bird" and terrorist as some quipped. All manner of his fabricated unsuitability was brought to the public domain but since we knew better, (i.e. as to what the man represented and/or stood for) we went to the polls and defied the media plus the doubting Thomases to give Mandela a thumbs up.
During his tenure, Mandela went on to become a conciliatory president and quelled the fears of those who thought that he was going to drive all Whites to the sea, unlike Uganda's Idi Amin had done to the Indians during his presidency. Of course reconciliation was a necessary exercise although in the end it was done to the detriment of Black people since the oppressors were not willing to make sacrifices.
The question I would like to ask Mr Uys is how the ANC could hijack Mandela when it was he who said that, "if I die, I want to be buried by the ANC and even when I get to heaven I will recruit people to join the ANC". These words are contained in a speech which was read by his daughter on his behalf at the launch of the ANC's manifesto in January 2009. Now, since others doubted that he had in fact made such pronouncements, Mandela set about to go public despite his retirement status in politics. It was Madiba, himself after the resounding success of the ANC's manifesto launch, who requested to be included in the next ANC rally. In his own words he said, "come rain or sunshine I want to attend the next ANC rally..." Madiba didn't want any venue other than the province of his birth Eastern Cape and indeed as he had undertaken, when rain came he honoured his promise like a true and disciplined cadre of the ANC.
Looking at that article by Mr Uys, I can't help but wonder whether he genuinely doesn't know or he was being mischievous. It seems to me that he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else that Madiba is no longer a member of the ANC or that he doesn't want anything to do with the ANC. I say this on the back drop of Mr Stanely Uys' accusation in his article dated 5 February that the Jacob Zuma led ANC hijacked Madiba. Anyone who doesn't know the truth would be tempted to believe this misguided assertion by Uys but some of us who are in the know are not at all swayed by such mischievous distortions of facts. Some people, the likes of Mr Uys were not happy with this turn of events and they wish that Madiba could perhaps have distanced himself from the ANC and rather endorsed the rogue party called COPE whose advent they hailed as a "breath of fresh air".
It pained them to see Mandela with Zuma, (their most hated politician) and thus they insinuated that Mandela was taken against his will or that his family was side stepped. They in the process insinuated that Mandela is now senile and can't make his own decisions. It shocked them beyond belief that Mandela didn't publicly lambaste Zuma in order to win favour with them but what he did instead was to embrace him. They forget one important fact and that is that it was the ANC which made Mandela to become what he is today.
It was certainly not the other way around, (as in it wasn't Mandela who made the ANC what it is today because by the time he became its president we had already had many capable presidents of statesman quality). Those of us who are card carrying members will tell you (Mr Uys) that Mandela was even more militant that Julius Malema. Your memory is failing you such that you have forgotten that Mandela was amongst the founder members of Umkhonto WeSizwe, the ANC's military wing and the ANC Youth League.
Mandela and a group of other ANC "hotheads" as the media would refer to them nowadays, convinced then ANC president Chief Albert Luthuli to allow them to start the armed struggle as opposed to a peaceful demonstration as a way of usurping power from the oppressive White and undemocratic regime. The apartheid government was not happy with this turn of events and through the moles who disclosed Mandela's whereabouts, he was arrested. It is by the way the same fate which befell Zuma who was also sold out and arrested in Zeerust. He ended up serving 10 years in prison and like his predecessors he has been publicly vilified as unsuitable for the role of president forgetting that he was once a deputy president. Logically, if someone is good enough to become a deputy president it follows that they are good enough to succeed the president unless of course you are a hypocrite like Mr Uys.
It is for this reason that some of us believe that Zuma is well qualified to become our next state president and that his lack of formal education means nothing. We continue to subscribe to the view that he is a victim of a conspiracy and a smear campaign as was confirmed by the NPA. The common denominator is that it is by those who are suspected to have colluded with the apartheid regime in order to delay our independence. In exile when OR was addressing cadres, he once said, "when we go back home, we are going to be fighting an enemy that is amongst us whereas here in exile it was easy to identify the enemy..."
My suspicion is that the one thing that drives a chill down these spineless people's spine is that after agreeing to such compromising clauses as the sunset clause, they are afraid, very afraid that once Zuma ascends to his rightful place he will reveal all. They should however know better than to think that Zuma would ever do such a thing because he knows that it would destroy the movement. They can therefore relax because Zuma is not a vindictive man and he won't expose them for who they are and neither is he about to drive all White people into the sea. Meredith was correct in comparing Zuma to Kruger because there are numerous similarities in their rise to power against all odds.
As an aside but in closing, in one of my previous articles about both the Sunday Times and Mr Mondli Makhanya being pawns in a dirty political war, the line "...soared whilst the readership of these newspapers..." was removed by what I attributed to either of a corrupt system or bug, and/or being the work of the spooks who abuse their offices in order to silence us, in private email exchange with this site's editor.
This removal had the effect of distorting the intended message and for the record, I had actually written that sentence this way, "Such has been their failure that instead of Zuma's support waning, it actually soared whilst the readership of these newspapers plummeted and this is what I suspect makes Mondli and his ilk to be desperate..." Since in ANC we are taught discipline and restraint when you are being attacked personally, I didn't entertain Paul Trewhela. In our circles we do not promote dialogue, which is a political jargon word that refers to an unsavoury situation where there is a mudslinging exchange of words between parties on a point of difference.
The views expressed above are mine and no one should be held accountable for them as I write in my personal capacity
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