Nelson Mandela International Day is all about mobilizing people, governments, NGOs, and corporations to take steps every day to make this world a better place.
The United Nations sent out a clarion call today for everyone to redouble efforts to meet the Mandela Day organization’s 2030 goals.
Mandela Day goals
Goal 1 – Provision of quality education for all children.
Goal 2 – All children in Early Childhood Development (ECD) to have access to learning resources for development.
Goal 3 – Reduce hunger in families through the provision of nutritious meals.
Goal 4 – Eliminate malnutrition and stunting in young children.
Goal 5 – Provide safe shelter for families to live and thrive in.
Goal 6 – Eliminate homelessness.
Goal 7 – Sanitation that is safe in every school.
Goal 8 – Enable access of safe sanitation for all communities.
Goal 9 – Dedicate more resources to supporting poverty eradication projects.
Goal 10 – Encourage public participation and activist voices towards the eradication of poverty and inequality.
After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.
(Nelson Mandela)
Imagine such humility and restless aspiration in a man so great. Because this should inspire (if not shame) us to spend the rest of our lives trying to help the world reach these goals.
Why does South Africa look so much like Zimbabwe?
The tragic irony is that no country needs not just to implement the Mandela Day 2030 goals but to embrace Mandela’s core values more than his own native South Africa.
This blog is replete with commentaries bemoaning “clear signs of political amorality, immaturity and general administrative incompetence,” which show the country’s inexorable descent into the heart of darkness. That descent began when South Africans chose hopelessly compromised Jacob Zuma over resolutely principled Thabo Mbeki to be Mandela’s heir.
I not only warned what this choice portended but expressed fatalism when they replaced corrupt Jacob Zuma with “captured” Cyril Ramaphosa.
Trust me, I could go on all day, but you get the point. The titles to just five of those commentaries speak volumes:
- “Aping Zimbabwe, South Africa Expropriating White Farms to Give to Blacks,” August 12, 2018
- “Wither South Africa,” April 10, 2017
- “Zuma Doing to South Africa What Mugabe Did to Zimbabwe,” December 12, 2015
- “South Africa ‘Betraying Its Values,” May 13, 2011
- “In South Africa, Xenophobic Blacks Prove Almost as Deadly as Apartheid Whites,” May 23, 2008…
ANC betraying Mandela’s values
Given those titles alone, it’s easy to see why many of my South African friends initially took offense at my commentaries on their beloved country. They took particular offense at the recurring analogies I drew between things falling apart in South Africa and the way they fell apart in Zimbabwe.
But when Ramaphosa began aping Mugabe’s “black empowerment land reforms,” even die-hard ANC supporters began admitting I was right all along. In fact, it turns out Zimbabweans are the ones who should have taken offense… Nothing demonstrated this quite like this July 6 headline in The Guardian:
- Promised land: how South Africa’s black farmers were set up to fail
Even so, I’ve been constrained to point out that they did not have to take my word. Because I invariably reinforced it with the abiding lamentations of Mandela’s most trusted comrades.
For example, I often cited this from Nobel laureate (for literature) and celebrated anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer:
The original values of the ANC are being betrayed in many areas of our social life and our political life… I maintain the right to criticize my own party. I feel it’s a duty that we who are in the ANC must say what we think when the ANC does wrong….
(BBC, May 10, 2011)
And, more to the point, this from Nobel laureate (for peace) and celebrated anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
They should please not choose someone of whom most of us would be ashamed. Our country deserves better… What is happening in the ANC?
(BBC, December 15, 2007)
Alas, South Africa seems fated to become just another failed state on a continent that looms amidst the continents of the world as a dark, destitute, diseased, desperate, disenfranchised, dishonest, disorganized, disassociated, dangerous and, ultimately, dysfunctional mess…
(Have you been reading about the all-too-predictable fate that is befalling its newest state, South Sudan…? Sad. Shame.)