By Ochereome Nnanna
If you ask anyone, “who is the greatest African of all time?”, the name of Nelson Mandela of South Africa will likely pop up. I took this question to three Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. They all chorused “Dr Nelson Mandela.”
While Gemini and Claude held Kwame Nkrumah in second place with Mansa Musa third, ChatGPT put Mansa Musa second and Nkrumah third. In typical fashion, ChatGPT went on to rank six other greats: Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, Haile Selassie, Thomas Sankara, Shaka Zulu and Nnamdi Azikiwe.
Glad to see a Nigerian made it, even if he “carried last.” What an irony that the same Azikiwe who inspired Nkrumah into Pan-Africanism, while chieftains of his political machine, the NCNC, sheltered Mandela in Nigeria before he went home to be convicted, is mentioned almost as a footnote. For me, the honour is between Mansa Musa, the 14th-century emperor of old Mali, and Selassie, who also reigned as the last emperor of Ethiopia. They were great kings who were second to nobody outside the continent.
Mandela’s fame cannot be denied. But from what we see in the South Africa he left behind, it is essentially hype-driven. Mandela was a favourite of the West and its media because of the way he managed South Africa’s transition from apartheid to freedom and democracy without bloodshed in his voluntary five-year, single tenure of office. He created what was referred to as a “rainbow nation” where the former white and black constituents cohabited in … emm … harmony.
Here is where the failure shows up: Mandela ended one form of apartheid and, wittingly or unwittingly, installed another form of it. Instead of setting black and white apart racially, he set them apart politically and economically. The black majority, led by Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), took over political power, which it has monopolised since 1991 when he was installed as the first black president.
The whites have gradually retreated from tussling for political control, choosing instead to hold tightly to their share of the booty: the economy and land control. A properly integrated country should have many white politicians vying for and getting elected as presidents inside the ANC, while blacks should be strong economic stakeholders with full access to land.
Because of this new apartheid, poverty among the black population has worsened under the ANC. Increasingly, the blacks and whites are once again eyeing each other across an invisible drawn battle line. Indeed, South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, in May 2025 had a series of face-offs with President Donald Trump of the United States over alleged white genocide aimed at driving the white people out of South Africa.
The main thrusts of Mandela’s failure are three-pronged. He and his ANC leadership failed to groom the South African youth in the ethos of hard work and enterprise to enable them to compete for their fair share of the economic resources of South Africa. The old malaise of laziness, indolence, drunkenness and loose sexual virtues trapped a vast percentage of the youth in poverty and the HIV/AIDS scourge.
The end of apartheid also attracted the arrival of other African youths from neighbouring countries and not-so-neighbouring countries such as Nigeria and Ghana. They came with the hard work and enterprise that the South African youths lacked, and before you knew it, the indigenous South Africans started seeing the foreigners as a threat.
This feeling was further stoked by the fact that the more affluent foreigners, especially Nigerians, took the best of the stock of South African damsels for themselves. Throughout history, women and economic booty have sparked countless wars. Homer’s Odyssey, from where we derived expressions like “Achilles’ heel,” “Trojan horse” and others, is all about a ten-year war between Greece and Troy over a beautiful lady known as Helen.
And so, foreigners in South Africa became the soft, easy targets for enraged indigenous youth. Waves of xenophobic attacks on foreigners have taken over 600 lives since 2008, with the South African law-enforcement agencies failing to act. The government of South Africa and the country’s law-enforcement machinery abandoned the foreigners to the mobs.
It is the job of government to enforce the law on illegal migration and alleged crimes, but they give armed rabble free rein to help themselves. For the third time, the Federal Government and some of our international carriers have had to fly hundreds of stranded Nigerians home from South Africa.
Mandela and the ANC failed to educate their young people on the role Africans, especially Nigeria, played to support the anti-apartheid struggle. Instead, they surged into Nigeria with their multinational companies such as Multichoice, MTN, Shoprite, Spar and others to gorge on our humongous market while refusing to give our citizens in their country a fair chance to live in safety. That is what we get for our sacrifices for Mandela and the ANC. South African criminal gangs have engaged in orgies of looting of foreigners’ shops and businesses.
Unfortunately for them, the erstwhile bustling business districts and markets operated by the deserting foreigners have left the economy in shambles. Is it the lazy, HIV/AIDS-infested drunkards who will now provide the juice the economy needs to come back to life? Let us watch and see how South Africa tides through the lacuna.
All I am saying is that Nelson Mandela and the ANC have failed their own people and Africa at large. It was only Mandela and the big politicians who benefitted from the end of apartheid. They left their own people behind. They repaid our good with evil. It is unfortunate that the so-called African Union and its organs exist only in name. One way or the other, South Africa must be made to pay a price for betraying Africa. South Africa, ANC: shame on you!
*Nnanna is a commentator on public issues
No comments:
Post a Comment