by Okey Ikechukwu

Which former Nigerian leader can boast of a mentoring programme than comes from within, as exemplified in his of her life? The vain self-glorification that has overrun the land here stands silly and bedraggled before the genuineness of a Nelson Mandela – one of the greatest sons of Africa and the 21st century.

“Go and prepare yourselves,” was Mandela’s words to Thabo Mbeki and some other young south Africans who came up with an elaborate plan to bring the then apartheid regime to a quick end. The plan was hare-brained, through and through. Nelson Mandela and a few others who made up the core leadership team of the liberation struggle told the young men so. Their sympathies were with the brash and outraged young men, but their better judgment urged both restraint and strategy, not imprudent enthusiasm. On the occasion of this historic encounter with the young men, Mandela maintained a calm steady gaze as he listened to the young Mbeki and his group. The plans included sporadic disruption of public peace, the bombing of vulnerable white neighbourhoods. A few murders were bound to have been thrown in this ‘progressive and patriotic’ endeavour. But the entire plan was fundamentally flawed. There were major consideration the young enthusiasts overlooked.

At the first level, the young men did not really understand the true nature of the struggle, or what they must avoid if the struggle was to succeed. To run amok in the streets, ostensibly in an attempt to run the white man out of town, was simply to line up helpless, hapless but angry young natives to be shot, killed and buried. That would only impact negatively on the active, able-bodied population, ruin whatever local economy they had and create a self-replicating wave of young suicide-minded liberationists. These latter would be much younger than the Mbeki team, who would have been killed before them. This will create an even less informed youth generation, who would know still less about what the struggle really meant. The focus of the fight would have eventually boiled down to nothing more than a mayhem-spurning periodic conflagration, with close to 100 % black casualty and zero white casualties.
The struggle demanded much more than anger and cudgels. It called for a growing population of black South Africans who are armed with knowledge, who understand group cohesion, who can create and sustain strategic partnerships and who can stand on the relevant local and global platforms and make compelling presentations and demands. It was a fight between the light of sound values and sustainable humanity and the darkness created by greed, wrong social values and a jaundice humanity.

At the second level, Mbeki and his group needed to understand that the new generation of South Africans to lead the struggle must understand the meaning of SACRIFICE, in its strict, authentic and proper sense. It is a wrong notion of sacrifice for a man to allow himself to be run over by a trailer because he does not want the trailer to drive past a road that was built atop his family’s traditional farmland. His death is plain folly, especially if it turns out that he is one of the few members of his family who can make a good case for compensation to the authorities. If, in addition he is also the major benefactor of the extended family who is paying the school fees of the children of his poorer siblings then his death would be a calamity of near-cosmic proportions.
With the trailer dispatching him to his obviously unexpectant ancestors, he would have many promising ruined lives, aborted careers, disbanded a replacement generation and probably made havoc of the entire extended family. Such a death would be classified as a foolish one; and whoever would praise such “heroic” death and called the departed a great and principled soul who ‘paid with his blood’ would also be a fool. Real heroism in a situation like this means insisting on what is right, refusing to back down in the face of opposition, not being swayed by considerations about personal safety, threats or enticements. It would include going to the grave without necessarily having your way, but yet not having backed down and without doing anything unduly rash and not thought through.

At the third level, the young Mbeki and his co-travellers needed to understand the political economy of power. This is important in any struggle, or any effort at social transformation. Bright-eyed idealism is the greatest threat to any realistic attempt to attain group goals, especially when such quest calls for effort, sober and unaffected planning, as well as strategic networking. The South African economy was dominated by white supremacists. Authority and power relations were determined, defined and guided by economic factors that drew their strength from racial underpinnings. The combination of forces defining the social relations had crystallised into two permanent layers. The one on top, made up of whites, used the one under, made of blacks, as providers of menial services. The latter group was therefore just a service population with no real skills, no rights, no rare competences and no sustainable means of livelihood outside their whit-dispensed monthly stipends.

Thus Mbeki and his team got a brief, but poignant lecture on how not to fight apartheid. Being that this lecture came just three weeks before Mandela and Mbeki’s father were thrown into jail, it made more than a passing impression. Had the young men gone ahead with their initial plan, they would all have most probably been shot in the streets before Mandela ended up in jail. “Seek and acquire knowledge” was a recurring feature of Mandela’s interventions and the admonitions were not in vain. The young men were urged to understand the dynamics shaping their environment and then to diligently go through the best institutions of learning, while simultaneously maintaining the needed networks and relations of trust with key actors in the Apartheid regime.

Thus when it was time for the final negotiations to actually put an end to apartheid in South Africa, 27 years after Mbeki and others were told to go and ‘prepare’ themselves and 27 years after Mandela and Mbeki’s father were incarcerated, this team of former young men were among the principal actors in all the negotiations. They were also on hand to leverage the new government and usher in a new, rainbow-governed South Africa. A South Africa powered by personal and group discipline, true commitment to sacrifice and a new culture of live and let live.

Mandela was President of South Africa, but the mere fact of his having been a president is not his legacy – even though no one would have really filled that office at the time the way he did. The presidency of any country as such can be made such a purely administrative role that anyone can fill it. But the only presidents and presidencies that leave a mark in the minds of men and in the sands of time are those wherein the people occupying the office stood forth and spoke up in everything they did and said –  for good or ill. Commitment to truth and justice to humanity defined Mandela’s very essence as a man. It was this that he brought to bear on all that he did and lived for. As President of South Africa, he was consciously committed to the creating of a legacy of goodness among his people. This made him the number one mentor of his people and his nation.

Mandela was a moral exemplar for a world that had become somewhat too jaded for the values of true humanity. He was the peerless African and world citizen who became a legend across all continents, across all races, across all cultures and across all religions while he was yet alive. Mandela was, until his death, a living legend. He left a legacy of wisdom in a world and in an ear that laughs at the very idea of wisdom – a world that considers wisdom to be the concern of dreamy-eyes fools who are too silly to take advantage of any positions they occupy and grow fat at everyone’s expense.

Mandela saw beyond the fact of an end to apartheid to the need for a replacement generation that would not stain the banner of their nationhood and their common humanity.  Above all, he advertised the power of conviction and the fact that a man does not need to make an apology for his beliefs, for who he is and for what he lives for. Though more than fiery himself, Mandela’s imprisonment can best be described as an act of grace; and as part of the plan of providence to prepare him for his historic role in this life. It was during the years of his incarceration that a further deepening occurred in the personality of Mandela, turning the wise, deliberate, sometimes tempestuous and unwavering liberation fighter into a sage. He stepped into prison convinced that there was injustice and that he must root it out without mercy. He stepped out of prison armed with the knowledge of ‘how’ to carry out the task. He brought forth a template that showed the forethought of a man who had come to the sobering realisation that both the oppressor and the oppressed need to be liberated from their peculiar forms of bondage. Ignorance and wrong practices handed down as truth lay behind many of the things he saw differently before.

The lesson for us all perhaps is to ask where our nation stands today in world reckoning, knowing that it was Nigeria that literally liberated South Africa and all the other countries of Southern Africa. Which former Nigerian leader stands anywhere near the stature of Mandela? Which former Nigerian leader can boast of a mentoring programme than comes from within, as exemplified in his of her life? The vain self-glorification that has overrun the land here stands silly and bedraggled before the genuineness of a Nelson Mandela – one of the greatest sons of Africa and the 21st century.

 

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Read this article in the Thisday Newspapers

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.