ANALYSIS: South Africa short on heroes as Mandela hits 90

By Clare Byrne Jul 15, 2008, 3:08 GMT

Johannesburg - On the eve of Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday on July 18, a new call for arms has gone up from within the ranks of his African National Congress (ANC).

South Africa may have achieved its freedom from apartheid 14 years ago, in no small part through Mandela's skill as a negotiator with his former jailors, but the fight is far from over, if some ANC cadres are to believed.

They're still talking about a revolution, but the stakes have changed. While the anti-apartheid struggle was about achieving the emancipation of all South Africans, now ANC members say they are prepared to lay down their lives to ensure one man, Jacob Zuma, becomes state president.

'We are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma,' Julius Malema, president of the once-venerable ANC Youth League, of which Mandela was a founder and president, said recently.

Hear, hear, said the head of the influential Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU), Zwelinzima Vavi, another backer of controversial ANC president Zuma, who hopes to succeed Thabo Mbeki as president in elections, despite facing trial on corruption charges.

No sooner had Malema promised to never use the word 'kill' again after being ticked off by the Human Rights Commission for incitement than he was again threatening Zuma's detractors with violence.

'We must intensify the struggle to eliminate the remnants of counter-revolution, which include the DA (opposition Democratic Alliance) and a loose coalition of those who want to use state power to block the ANC president's ascendancy to the highest office of the land,' he said.

This increasingly war-like rhetoric from Mandela's party and COSATU in the run-up to next year's elections, following on the biggest outbreak in violence in South Africa since the 1990s in May, pour cold water on the vision Mandela expressed for the nation when he became president in 1994.

'Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world,' he said triumphantly during his inauguration.

Skunk may be too strong a term for how South Africa is viewed in the world - being dwarfed in the bad-odour stakes by neighbouring Zimbabwe - but most observers agree something is rotten in the Rainbow Nation.

This year's conference of the Youth League, once an incubator of leaders of Mandela's ilk, saw bottles flying across the room as drunken thirty-somethings bared their bums while debating a ban on alcohol sales.

While Zuma condemned those antics, he took no issue with the threats to spill blood in his name.

May's xenophobic riots, in which 62 African migrants were killed and tens of thousands of others chased from their homes by South Africans - and Mbeki's po-faced declaration that there was no crisis in Zimbabwe - further sealed South Africa's slide from its Mandela- era moral heyday.

On these and other issues, including splits within the ANC between Zuma and Mbeki factions, Mandela was called on by South Africans to pull another 1994-style 'miracle' out of the bag by 'saying something.'

But while the elderly leader did speak out on Zimbabwe, lamenting the 'tragic failure of leadership' in the country at a birthday dinner in London, he had little to say about the situation at home.

'South Africans are finding it very difficult to deal with Mandela the icon,' Achmat Dangor, head of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, told South Africa's The Weekender newspaper.

'On the one hand, they want to see him as an aloof distant father figure above the political fray ... and yet, whenever there's a problem or a crisis, they expect him to step out of his sanctity and come and resolve it for them.'

Whether Mandela still has much influence in world affairs is a moot point. His Zimbabwe comment made headlines worldwide, but most African leaders shied away from taking his lead in openly condemning President Robert Mugabe's regime.

As Mandela's grandson, Bambatha says: 'Every child must grow up and lead themselves. We can't always be looking to him.'