Mourning Nelson Mandela: dissenting voices amid the adulation

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/07/africa-mourns-mandela-museveni-kagame

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Mourning Nelson Mandela was always going to be a delicate task for many African leaders because they are often compared unfavourably with the sainted former leader of South Africa.In the hours after his death, praise flowed for the hero of the anti-apartheid movement. But the eulogies were notable for what they omitted.

In his youth, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni was one of a group of revolutionaries who joined training camps in Mozambique and Tanzania, where progressives on the continent plotted to overthrow repressive regimes in countries from Uganda to Zimbabwe to South Africa.

Museveni eventually led a guerrilla force that toppled the government in Kampala and installed a new team widely credited with stabilising the nation after decades of misrule by a succession of tyrants from Idi Amin to Milton Obote.

Yet, unlike Mandela, Museveni lingered on in power for too long and is now in his 27th year in office. He preferred not to dwell on that and instead praised Mandela as a liberation hero.

"Mzee Mandela and his colleagues in the ANC have fulfilled their mission of throwing out the oppressors. It is the duty of the present generation to immunise Africa against future colonisation," he said in a statement in Uganda's <em>New Vision</em> newspaper.

Writing in Kenya's biggest newspaper, the <em>Daily Nation</em>, Rwanda's Paul Kagame also sought to make some domestic points.

He praised the former South African leader as "an uncompromising enemy of injustice, an unwavering fighter for freedom, a man whose spirit and resolve were unbroken by the harshest prison conditions and deprivations of a normal life, patient and hopeful of victory, a rallying point for his comrades and those opposed to discrimination everywhere".

But he also stated that the period of great hope in South Africa – when Mandela was completing the remarkable journey from prison to the presidency – was also the moment of deepest misery in Rwanda when nearly a million people were killed by a murderous Hutu supremacist regime.

"When Nelson Mandela and the ANC were arriving at the decision to launch an armed struggle to liberate South Africa, a large section of Rwandans was being driven out of their country and into exile by a regime with its own apartheid-style system … Others inside the country had to suffer suppression and isolation from the rest of the world.

Similar circumstances of long years of oppression and dispossession drove both our peoples to wage a struggle to restore their rights and dignity. South Africans bore many years of brutality, but never relented in their fight for freedom."

Both Kenya and Tanzania declared three days of mourning. The newspapers were full of gushing reviews of Mandela's life and example. Yet in online forums, there was a sharper debate about the great man's legacy. While Mandela enjoys near-universal adulation for his unquestionable sacrifices and outsize personality, on the African left he has numerous critics who say he failed to dismantle the economic system that kept the black majority in penury under the apartheid system.

One contributor, Eric Kipkoech, offered this assessment: "What is this statesman thing about? Mandela had gold and diamonds, millions of acres of large-scale farms for corn, wheat and sugar, prosperous institutions, some of which are centuries old – some South African universities are about 200 years old. Yet by the time his successor left power, blacks were yet to see the fruits of the struggle."

The contribution drew a sharp riposte from another commentator, KC Rottok. "Mandela midwifed a world- class constitution that respected all, put in place programmes to reverse effects of apartheid, retired honourably after one term, wasn't corrupt. Now that's one man whose hand I wish I shook. An icon. A legend. A hero."

<em>Murithi Mutiga is an editor with the Sunday Nation in Kenya</em>

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