‘To sum up, through the various schemes sketched above, we have managed to house three million people in the last five years, approved over a million subsidies, restored a people’s human dignity by turning single-sex hostels into family units.*
‘We have for the first time in the history of our country introduced a non-discriminatory policy which saw the most vulnerable members of our society getting access to affordable homes – widows, pensioners, the unemployed and the disabled.’34
Although the ANC’s target of one million houses in the first five years was not met, Mandela took comfort that his government had made the kind of progress that was unequalled anywhere on the globe. Millions of people were given the dignity and security of decent shelter. Yet the backlog hardly showed signs of diminishing. The government of South Africa became the unintended victim of its own success in dislodging apartheid; the removal of restrictions on the movement of Africans led to massive internal migration and stimulated social change, which saw families unbundle into smaller units. By 1999 the proportion of informal households (or households in informal areas) had grown from 7.5 per cent to 12.3 per cent.35
Mandela was also concerned by the size of the houses, which couldn’t be helped given the government’s limited resources. On seeing the first houses, he joked that the occupiers’ feet would stick out of the front door. Possibly influenced by memories of a succession of poky cells that he had lived in from the time of his arrest in 1962 to his release in 1990, he asked Joe Slovo, the minister of housing, if there wasn’t an alternative approach, such as serviced sites on which people could be subsidised to build their own houses.36
Stephen Laufer, then Joe Slovo’s adviser, remembers that the Ministry of Housing explored various ideas to deal with the housing deficit facing the government. The issue of subsidised housing was rejected as a throwback to apartheid practices; there was, however, a thought of creating housing depots, suitably staffed and equipped with expertise and materials to help people to build their own dwellings. This wasn’t, however, followed up after Joe Slovo’s death in 1995.37
* * *
Mandela took a special and personal interest in the areas where the poorest of the poor are usually the most vulnerable – education and health. He worried in particular about the efficacy of the school-nutrition scheme, access to primary health care for pregnant women and children under six, and the building and upgrading of clinics and schools both by government and through partnerships he personally forged with private sector corporations.
Sensitive to the inequalities ravaging South African society, Mandela pursued his own personal mission. From the time he walked out of the gates of Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, on the afternoon of 11 February 1990, Mandela had sought to get the business community to have more empathy with the majority – and to encourage it to undertake targeted social-investment initiatives. While making these overtures, he was also aware of a counter-narrative operating in the media, which portrayed the new political players, especially MPs, as money-grubbing, and he did as much as he could to dispel that image. Occasionally, however, such comments came from those he respected, and these were much harder to bear. For example, John Carlin, who had interviewed Mandela on numerous occasions, wrote a piece for UK newspaper the Independent headlined ‘ANC Boards the Gravy Train: John Carlin in Johannesburg on the Underdogs Who Have Become Fat Cats in a Few Months’. In it he said that ‘Mandela promised in his election victory speech that the era of the fat cats was over, that the “government of the people” would tolerate no more gravy trains. What he failed to anticipate was that the gap between government and people would widen after the dawn of democracy.’ In the same report, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was quoted saying that the new government had ‘“stopped the gravy train only long enough to get on”’.38
Yet even before the ANC received such stinging criticisms from trusted friends and allies, Mandela had decided to donate one-third of his salary to promoting the cause of children’s rights. In a speech given in June 1994 to mark the anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, he said:
‘I am consulting with relevant individuals and bodies, for me to set up a Presidential Trust Fund representative of people beyond the ANC and the mass democratic movement, to specifically deal with the problems of street children and detainees. I intend to make a contribution of R150,000 a year to this fund, irrespective of the decision that Parliament will make about the salaries of elected representatives. Further details will be announced in due course.
‘The Fund I have referred to will assist in alleviating these problems. But I do recognise, as all of you do, that a lasting solution lies in comprehensive socio-economic uplifting programmes. At the same time, the youth, especially from disadvantaged communities, need to realise that we cannot rely only on governmental programmes and charity. We also have to take initiatives in our communities to pool our meagre resources for projects such as bursaries and skills upgrading.’39
The Presidential Trust Fund was to form the basis of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, which became a vehicle not only for helping build partnerships with business leaders but also ensured that these partnerships were not dependent on state machinery and could thus produce swift results in areas of great need. Although the results were visible and impressive, Mandela acknowledged that they were no substitute for the mass provision of services by the state.
But he knew that South Africa’s destiny was irreversibly intertwined with its capacity to educate its people. Progress was reliant on it, and education had always been close to his heart. ‘The emancipation of people from poverty and deprivation is most centrally linked to the provision of education of quality,’ he said.
‘While the poor and suffering masses of our people bore the weight of the liberation struggle, we acknowledge that we would not have advanced in the manner we did if it was not for the education that many of our leaders and cadres obtained. We recognised that emancipation from illiteracy and ignorance was an important part of our liberation struggle, and that education was key to that.
‘It was for that same reason, for example, that one of the first things we set out to do when we were incarcerated on Robben Island prison, was to prepare for the education and further education of ourselves as inmates. Many political prisoners learnt to read and write for the first time on Robben Island. Many obtained degrees and further degrees on the Island. And the informal education through reading and discussion was probably the most significant part of our stay in that prison.
‘One of the cruellest ways in which the apartheid system hit at our people was through the deliberate undermining of the quality of public education and the destruction of non-state education through, for example, the churches that sought to provide quality education. Today [as] we seek to reconstruct and develop our country, we have to battle that legacy of inferior education deliberately provided to the masses of our people.
‘Had it not [been] for the missionaries, I probably would not have been here today. They are the people who introduced education to blacks in South Africa … They bought the land, built the schools, equipped them, employed teachers who taught us. Right from primary school to the University of Fort Hare, I was at missionary schools. The Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, the Anglican Church and the Catholics. And that is why religion is in our blood because we are the product of missionary education.
‘We place education and training at the centre of the developmental policies of our democratic government. We realise that without a broad corps of educated, highly skilled and well-trained people, we cannot become the winning nation we wish to be in order to provide better lives for all our people.’40
* * *
Future historians will doubtless ask probing questions about Mandela’s work with the poor, his predilection for delving into avenues – or competencies – that should have been the province of ministries or government departments. How was it possible, for instance – or even desirable – that his efforts would s
upplant the work of the ministries of education and health? In picking up the slack and attempting to mitigate the brutal effects wrought by more than three centuries of organised plunder, did he never wonder if his contribution, important as it might have been, was a mere palliative for a chronic disease? When he walked through the townships and informal settlements and saw the devastation and ruin, the children with bloated stomachs and spindly legs and faces on which flies danced with glee, wasn’t there a moment when he felt an inexpressible urge to grab De Klerk by the scruff of the neck and force him to look – look at the ruin you’re now pretending to have never been party to?
Such questions, of course, would have been distractions from Mandela’s single-minded programme to construct the democracy he had set out to build from the moment he started negotiations with his captors. Their handiwork – the destruction that the nation now had to repair – was much more present in its lack, an absence born of neglect. There were barely any clinics; those that existed stood forlorn in village slums, in need of upgrading. Such neglect has a lot to do with the attitude of those who were supposed – and even paid – to provide these services; it speaks of an unspeakable brand of callousness.
Here, again, as in the priority programmes to be addressed in the first one hundred days, Mandela tacked on ongoing government programmes of building and upgrading facilities such as clinics and health-care centres, persuading the private sector to augment or even start up projects in partnership with government. He also used his standing to change attitudes that hindered the provision of services such as health care.
Speaking much later at a conference, Mandela reminisced on some of his efforts. ‘When I was president of South Africa,’ he said, ‘I went round the country with the then Minister of Social Welfare Geraldine [Fraser-]Moleketi. Every city or rural area we went to, we told parents to bring the children who are suffering from terminal diseases, like HIV/AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis, malaria. “We also want you to bring children who are disabled, either physically or mentally.” And the fact that the president of a country is seen sitting at table with children with HIV/AIDS and suffering from terminal diseases, children who are disabled, makes the parents less ashamed of their children. And the parents will say: “If the president of a country and the minister of welfare can sit at table and enjoy a meal with our children who suffer from terminal diseases, why must we be ashamed of them? We want them to come out and be seen and to enjoy life like ordinary individuals.”’41
Mandela appreciated people being treated like ordinary individuals, mainly because his life – and the lives of his compatriots – in incarceration had been an endurance test, an obstacle course where to want to be treated as an ordinary person, a human being, was to court trouble. He was all too familiar with disease and death. Those close to him had died and he had been unable to bury them. Now, too, he was keenly aware of the attitudes towards those suffering from AIDS, a scourge loosed on the land, leaving a trail of death and destruction.
‘Now,’ he explained to journalists at his last media briefing as president, on 10 May 1999, ‘the question of AIDS of course is a very difficult problem, because we are faced with a conservative community. You will have seen that a lady in KwaZulu-Natal who confessed that she [was] HIV-positive was murdered, was stoned to death. And this is not an isolated case. As far back as 1991, I went to Mpumalanga, and I called a meeting of parents and I then addressed them on the question of AIDS, and I said to them, “In our community, you don’t talk about sex, no matter what you want to say about it. Sex is taboo.” And I said, “But we are facing this threat, which might develop into an epidemic. No single government has got resources to deal with it. It is something that must be dealt with by the government and the community.” And I say, “The time has come for you to teach your children about safe sex; that a person should have one partner, must have contraceptives and so on.” I could see as I was addressing them that I was saying something, you know, which was revolting to them. After the meeting, they came to me and said, “How can you talk like this? You want to encourage prostitution amongst our children? You think that there is a parent you see who can actually tell his or her child that you must have safe sex, you must have contraceptives and so on?” And my explanation was just meaningless.
‘And I went to Bloemfontein. This time I was warned; now, I had to be careful, and I asked the principal of the school. “Look, I want to talk about AIDS.” And she said to me – now, this is a principal with a degree, a university degree – she says to me, “Please don’t. If you continue like this, you will lose an election.” And, of course, I was keen not to lose an election. I had to abandon it.
‘So, a massive campaign of education is absolutely necessary to convince the public that they must now abandon old traditions and taboos because this is a disease that attacks the economically active section of the population. It can destroy the economy of the country … But it’s not very easy because we’re faced with this problem of the conservatism of the community as well as the churches. There are still some churches that feel that we are not handling the matter correctly by talking to parents and children and urging them to have safe sex; who say that nobody should have sex until that person is married. You still have churches with that point of view today.
‘But, nevertheless, this is something that is being dealt with. It has to be. There must be a number of initiatives educating the public and, of course, making sure that this drug [AZT] is available, but not at the expensive rate as it still is. It must be affordable, and we haven’t got resources to be able to give it free of charge … We just don’t have the resources. And we will acquire and distribute in accordance with our resources.’42
There may have been a lack of resources, but the new democratic government had Mandela at its helm – a man with unshakeable faith in his own power to get things done. It was power with its source in the people themselves. Everywhere he went, he was still greeted with the same enthusiasm as when he accepted the oath to lead the country as its first democratic president; he reciprocated this warmth with animated dignity, much like an athlete buoyed by supporters to achieve an amazing performance. He was seventy-five years old when he was sworn in as president of the Republic of South Africa, an age when most people choose to be retired, but he wasn’t most people and, like many of his compatriots who had languished in prison, he regarded retirement – a sedentary existence – as a rehearsal for, if not an invitation to, permanent rest in what Thabo Mbeki called a ‘small house of wood’.43 Retirement, temporary or permanent, had to wait. Mandela still had work to do – and the list of what needed to be done was long.
The ANC’s 1994 election manifesto had made specific commitments to what would be done over the next five years. It was an ambitious programme and throughout his presidency Mandela kept an eagle-eyed watch to see whether or not the mandate had been met. He wanted the public to be aware of the successes; he also wanted government’s eyes on the goals still to be achieved. Opening Parliament for the last time, Mandela summarised how South African lives had changed during the five years he had been president.
He told Parliament that the census of 1996, ‘whose result was made public last year, has for the first time, given South Africa a detailed comprehensive portrait of itself. And it is against its dimensions that we must measure our progress.’
Mandela then went on to read the statistics, citing successes in supplying millions with water near their homes; similarly with electricity, access to telephony, school nutrition programmes and services to the community living with disabilities.
‘This,’ he said, ‘means more than the dry rhyme of statistics. The words of Ms Gladys Nzilane of Evaton, who received keys to her new house last year, ring true to the heart: “I hear people on radio and television saying the Government has failed, but I do not believe that … [The Government] has given us life.”
‘In this, she was echoing the feelings of millions, including Mama Lenah Ntsweni of Mpumalanga who wa
s the three millionth person to receive safe and accessible water a few weeks ago.’
Mandela continued to list the developments, the jobs and the construction of facilities that would benefit society for generations to come. He set the government’s achievements against the burden of what was not yet done, and alluded, albeit without going into detail, to problems in a process that had neither been smooth nor continuous. He also acknowledged that some targets had been missed. But, with all that, he was still optimistic:
‘From the jobs summit, new initiatives have emerged,’ he said, ‘in a splendid partnership between business and Government, to start major projects that will put more roofs over the head of those in want. As this project starts unlocking the problem of limited public resources, so will its beneficiaries multiply – from the supplier of building materials to the small building contractor; from the new employees to those who will occupy these dwellings.’44
The five years of Mandela’s presidency had seen enormous social change, though less than had been hoped. Change was still greatest where action depended least on the national partnership that Mandela continually sought – greater where it concerned public service to families and households rather than economic advancement and opportunity; greater in alleviation of poverty than reduction of inequality.
There were other deficits, signs of the infirmities of the social order, which impacted on the lives of the majority of the people in the most immediate and visceral fashion. South Africans, especially black people, had always lived with violence – the structural violence evolved by the apartheid state apparatus, which was camouflaged and intangible; and the violence of crime, which spoke of the breakdown of the social fabric. The latter was more conspicuous and dramatic. Some would even go as far as to say that having a dark skin in a racist society was an invitation to violence.
The opposition tended to blow the crime situation out of all pro-portion, spreading stories and surveys that aimed to show that the democratic government was incapable. There was also the insistent refrain that violent crime had started on the day the new government came to power. Research in hand suggests otherwise. An article in The Conversation goes a long way in enlightening readers about the true state of affairs. It says that ‘from 1994 onwards, the murder rate [in South Africa] fell by an average of 4 per cent a year’ and that ‘the murder rate didn’t begin rising in 1994 – exactly the opposite. There was steady increase to the 1950s, a slightly more rapid rise to the 1960s, some years of relative stability, and then a massive spike to peak in 1993. Then things turned around.’45
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