Mandela's Death Raises Leadership Questions

Former president Thabo Mbeki on Sunday challenged South Africa’s leadership to ask if they are living up to Nelson Mandela’s standards, in a pointed public challenge to his ANC comrades.

Mbeki — who succeed Mandela as president in 1999 and was ultimately ousted by Jacob Zuma in a party coup — questioned whether current leaders were living up to Mandela’s values.

“I think to celebrate his life properly we need to ask ourselves a question about the quality of leadership,” Mbeki told a prayer gathering at the Oxford Shul synagogue in Johannesburg.

“To say: ’to what extent are we measuring up to the standard they (Nelson Mandela and his generation) set in terms of the quality of leadership?’” 

The leadership of the ruling African National Congress, previously headed by Mandela and Mbeki, has come under increasing fire over claims of nepotism and corruption.

The ANC under Zuma is preparing for national elections next year even as he faces accusations of using $20 million worth of taxpayer money on upgrading his private residence.

Mbeki said the remaining task of transforming South Africa into a truly free, fair and equal society was “in many respects more difficult than the struggle to end the system of apartheid”.

“Surely that must mean that therefore this challenge of leadership becomes much more important, much more complex in the context of what needs to be done,” he added.

Mbeki, South Africa’s president until Zuma took over in 2008, said South Africans must examine their loyalty to the values that Nelson Mandela and his generation had espoused.

“Are we in whatever echelon of our society, whatever we are doing in politics, in business, in unions, in civil society ... do we have the quality of leadership such as was exemplified by Mandela and others, sufficient to respond to the challenges we face?” he said.

“As we celebrate the life of Nelson Mandela this becomes a central task, that we reflect on what needs to be done to sustain his legacy, to ensure that we do not betray what he and others sacrificed for, what he and others stood for.”

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2013/12/08/mandela-s-death-raises-leadership-questions-mbeki

Who From Around The World

Who is coming to South Africa for the Mandela memorial......

  

 A projection of the face of former South African President Nelson Mandela and his clan name Madiba is projected onto the face of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.

More than 100 heads of state and government -- current and past -- as well as scores of celebrities and heads of international organisations have confirmed their presence at a memorial ceremony for former South African president Nelson Mandela, who died last week aged 95.

"By noon today, 9th December 2013, 91 heads of state and 10 former heads of state confirmed they will attend the memorial at FNB Stadium" on Tuesday, Minister in the Presidency Collins Chabane told the SAPA news agency.

Only Britain's Prince Charles has so far announced his presence at the funeral itself, to be held Sunday in the southern village of Qunu where Mandela spent his childhood.

The following are among those who have confirmed their presence at Tuesday's event:

Leaders

• US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle. Three predecessors, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with Secretary of State and former first lady Hillary Clinton, will also be present.
• French President Francois Hollande, accompanied by his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy.
• British Prime Minister David Cameron
• Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff
• President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmud Abbas
• Cuban President Raul Castro
• Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan
• Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara
• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
• Afghan President Hamid Karzai
• Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki
• Indian President Pranab Mukherjee
• German President Joachim Gauck
• Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati
• Chinese Vice President Liu Yuanchao
• Bangladeshi President Abdul Hamid
• Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain
• Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa
• Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Royals

• British Prince Charles
• The King of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander
• Crown Prince of Denmark Frederik
• Crown Prince Haakon of Norway
• Saudi Prince and Second Deputy Prime Minister Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud
• Japanese Crown Prince Naruhito

International organisations

• United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
• Chair of the African Union Commission Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma
• European Union President Herman van Rompuy
• Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi and ex-Irish president Mary Robinson will represent the group called The Elders, founded by Mandela in 2007.

Celebrities

• US talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey, singer and activist Bono, British singer Peter Gabriel and British magnate Richard Branson are among the stars attending the ceremony.

The absent

• The Dalai Lama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, father of the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro.

Times Live

 

Mandela V Zuma

 

By 

STEPHEN ROBINSON

Yesterday, I telephoned an old friend in Johannesburg to commiserate with her about the death of Nelson Mandela. What depressed her, she said, was not so much the passing of her 95-year-old political hero, but having to watch his successor announce it to the world.

‘To see Jacob Zuma standing there in front of the TV cameras made me feel sick,’ she said. ‘He is the absolute opposite of everything Mandela believed in and lived for.’



 As the world watches the Mandela obsequies being played out, a preening President Zuma will be the awful spectre at the wake, escorting presidents, prime ministers and princes around the ceremonies.

He is the embodiment of how the African National Congress, the oldest liberation movement in the world, has rotted from within and abandoned its founding principles as the defender of the poor and powerless black majority. 

Tainted: President Jacob Zuma is the embodiment 

of how the African National Congress, 

the oldest liberation movement in the 

world, has rotted from within.

On the very day that Mandela died, a crisis was approaching in a long-running scandal about £14.5 million of state money used to upgrade Zuma’s private home in a dirt-poor part of rural Zululand.





 Nkandla - before.



 Nkandla - after.


After colluding with Zuma in keeping an official report into the project secret, the ANC this week gave in to pressure and said South Africans do indeed have the right to know how their money was spent.

It is likely that the opposition in Parliament will make token efforts to impeach Zuma, but equally certain that because the public is so inured to corruption, he will be re-elected president in next year’s elections.

Not that Zuma is alone in funnelling state money for his own benefit. Today in South Africa, no road is built, no hole dug, no airport terminal extended without the payment of kickbacks to the politically well-connected.

In life, Mandela — who, as a foreign correspondent, I watched walk free from prison near Cape Town on February 11, 1990 — held his nation together. 

Today the country faces uncertainty. 

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said this week: ‘What is going to happen to us now our father has died?’

True, Mandela was scarcely well for the past five years or so, but that did not matter, for his very presence — weak as he was — served as a restraining force against those who might push too far against the ideals of the transition to democracy.

When he lived, he was a symbol of hope, and a warning of what might have been had the last white President F.W. de Klerk not had the courage to free him, and had Mandela lacked the grace to reciprocate with peace and reconciliation.

In a conscious disavowal of Mandela’s pleas for non-violence and non-racialism, Zuma peppers political rallies with performances of an old ANC guerrilla song, Bring Me My Machine Gun. 

This is a man who was acquitted on rape charges after explaining to the judge that the alleged victim was wearing a short skirt: ‘In Zulu culture, you cannot leave a woman if she is ready.’
When it was pointed out that the woman was known to be HIV positive and that Zuma had not used a condom, he famously explained that he had taken the precaution of showering after the act.

Since Mandela retired as president in 1999, South Africa has plunged down the international rankings of good governance. 

A recent survey found that very nearly half the South Africans who required a service from a government official in the past year had been required to pay a bribe. If township dwellers want a water pipe extended to their home, they have to grease palms. 

In the Johannesburg suburbs, the police set up road blocks next to cashpoint machines so motorists can readily get money for the bribes to avoid having to waste hours at the police station on trumped-up driving charges.

These hazards may seem relatively trivial. We are talking about Africa, after all, not some immaculately democratic Swiss canton. 

And, for sure, most South Africans still feel an overpowering sense of relief that their just departed leader steered the ship of state away from racial warfare when he was released from prison nearly 24 years ago. 

Yet still, the downward trajectory is disturbing. And the great fear, now that Mandela is no longer there, is that South Africa could spiral ever more rapidly  into decline. 

We in Europe must take our share of blame for the country’s embedded corruption. Much of it was established as far back as 1998, when our defence companies offered tens of millions of pounds in bribes to secure contracts as the South African government under Mandela sought to upgrade its weapons capacity.

The foreign arms companies polluted the South African political well, and ever since it has been getting more and more toxic. The result of this rampant corruption is that South Africans — especially the young — are increasingly rejecting the political process. 
Matters are not helped by the fact that there are no jobs for millions of young South Africans who complain the ANC now entrenches for the black elite what apartheid did for whites. It is true that the old apartheid state was corrupt. Sanctions, and the secrecy they impose on all manner of trading deals, are always a great boon to the corrupt officials looking for a backhander.

It was also, as we know, brutally repressive. I lived in South Africa for much of the Eighties, and I’ll never forget the police commander who was asked by a foreign journalist whether it was strictly necessary for his men to fire live rounds at  protesting school children who were hurling bricks.

‘When they throw rubber rocks at us, my men will fire rubber bullets at them,’ the commander replied, as though the journalist was just a little bit dim.

What is so depressing today is how much of that abhorrent apartheid mind-set has survived the transition to black majority rule. The South African police always used to be brutal in apartheid days. 

Today, they are not only brutal — they are corrupt from top to bottom.

Compelling evidence is now emerging that 34 striking miners killed last year at the Marikana platinum mine in the north of the country were actually the victims of a pre-planned police ambush. 

In the worst traditions of South Africa in the apartheid era, this grotesque police massacre was obscured from public view as long as possible by the authorities. 

According to a recent survey, the two least respected groups in South Africa are the police and the judiciary. 

When criminals are caught and charged, the wealthy can find a way to bribe the police and prosecutors to ensure they never go to court.

For years, South Africans have fretted about their country after Mandela, and worried what the future will bring. 

When Mandela walked free from jail, white South Africans worried the country could be convulsed by mayhem. They thought, or at least they claimed to think, that black South Africans would indulge themselves in an orgy of tribal violence, pitching tribes such as the Zulu and Xhosa against each other.

It did not happen then, and will not happen now. South Africa will not descend into total chaos; it will not ‘collapse’. 

But even under a man with the skill, charm, and steel of Mandela, the country came perilously close to disaster. 

And it is impossible to see how it can do anything but become more dangerous, more corrupt, and more impoverished under the shabby leadership of a ‘100 per cent Zulu boy’.

dailymail

Beyond Mourning

LONDON—In Johannesburg a few months ago, I asked a young, black, and politically savvy South African journalist how his newspaper would cover Nelson Mandela's death. 

He shook his head: He dearly wished not to have to cover it at all. "I just hope I'm not in the office that day. I just hope I'm away, maybe in a different country."

He knew, of course, what Mandela's death would bring: a moment of national reckoning, an assessment of "what have we achieved" in the years since Mandela's release from prison in 1990 and his inauguration as South Africa's first black president in 1994. 

I told the young man that what was written in the wake of Mandela's death would probably reveal less about the man and more about his country. He agreed: That's exactly what he didn't want to have to face.

And that’s exactly what has happened. As my journalist colleague predicted, the world’s sudden focus on Mandela's life has already begun to cast South Africa’s current leaders in an unflattering light. 

"Mandela looms like a one-man Mount Rushmore over his successors," David Smith wrote for the Guardian, "throwing their flaws into sharp relief." 

The Economist, more bluntly, points out that "misguided governance, low-quality education, skills shortages and massive unemployment levels of around 40%" have made the black population of South Africa "more disadvantaged today than when Nelson Mandela was still behind bars."

This may only be the beginning. After all, without Mandela, the African National Congress—the party he first joined in 1943 and that he led to electoral victory half a century later—will quickly lose whatever remains of its revolutionary magic. 

Without Mandela, the ANC can no longer pretend to be a party, as he once put it, with a "noble cause": It is simply the party of power. Although South African democracy is extraordinarily healthy in many senses—its media, judiciary, and civil society function well—ANC candidates have until now won most national, and regional, elections by enormous margins. That means that people join the party in large numbers to get jobs, to get contracts, to get ahead.

In this narrow sense, the ANC now functions like the Chinese Communist Party: The most important political debates in South Africa take place within its ranks and at its congresses. Actual electoral contests matter much less. 

The consequences of 20 years of mostly one-party rule are the same for South Africa as they are in China: ANC-owned companies enjoy privileged access to state contracts, ANC politicians have been involved in complex cases of corruption, businesses often succeed or fail because of their political contacts and not because of their merit.
  
 Without real political competition, ANC politicians are not motivated to reform a state that still doles out patronage to black insiders, just as the apartheid state once reserved its jobs and contracts for whites. 

While in Johannesburg, I met a politician from the Democratic Alliance, the ANC’s most serious rival. He explained, convincingly, how his party has made big changes in the Western Cape, where it runs the regional government. But no one yet believes the party can win a national vote.

There are reasons why the ANC continues to win elections, legitimately, even while failing to deliver much in the way of economic growth to its supporters. So far, rival parties have failed to capture the national imagination, even if some have done well in some regions. 

So far, the ANC has persuaded black voters that they would be "outsiders," even traitors, if they voted for others. But Mandela's aura—the patina of history and glamour he lent to the party—were also part of the explanation. 

During its last elections, in 2009, one South African journalist wrote that it felt as though the ANC were still "overseen by a pantheon of deities, including Mandela."

During the long months of Mandela's illness, many in South Africa almost seemed offended by the idea that his death would bring some kind of radical change. He had, after all, been out of politics for a long time, and his greatest achievement—the peaceful transition to democratic rule—is not under threat. 

But although it might be uncomfortable, his death should cause South Africans to look critically at the state he helped create and, above all, at the ANC, the party he led. 

If South Africans really want to honor Mandela’s memory, they should deepen South Africa’s democracy, and vote for somebody else.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2013/12/nelson_mandela_and_the_anc_south_africa_needs_new_leaders.html 

Perceptions....

Pik Botha Reflects on Mandela

 

Ex-South African foreign minister reflects on his relationship with Mandela

 By Roelof Frederik "Pik" BothanPublished December 07, 2013

 

I first met Nelson Mandela at the historic meeting between the former government and the African National Congress at Groote Schuur on May 2, 1990.

To this day, I remain deeply impressed by Mandela’s opening address.

He displayed a remarkably thorough knowledge of the history of the Afrikaner, referring to the pain and sorrow of the Anglo-Boer War: 27,000 women and children who died in the concentration camps. Boer soldiers returning to graves and ruined farms. The ensuing poverty of the Afrikaner and his harrowing feeling of being wronged.

The enormous suffering of the Afrikaner he could understand. But what he could not understand, he said, was why the Afrikaner, when they started recovering from their devastation, didn’t then reach out to their fellow black South Africans who were equally impoverished, degraded and subjugated.

He posed a haunting question to us.

The answer is that the whites also became victims of apartheid, the Afrikaner more so. We had fought fiercely and paid a terrible price for our own freedom, but failed to realize that we could not truly be free unless all the people living and working in what we considered to be white South Africa could share that freedom with us.

After I departed from politics in 1996, Mandela wrote the following inscription, dated July 30, 1997 in his biography “Long Walk to Freedom” which my daughter and her husband bought to commemorate the christening of their son, my grandson, James Barry Hertzog:

‘To James Barry Hertzog. You carry a historic name and are the grandson of an equally talented South African who has made his contribution towards the development of our country. Good luck on the occasion of your christening on 10 August 1997.”

(sgd) Nelson Mandela
30 July 1997”

Mandela knew that my son-in-law, Bertus Hertzog, was a descendant of Gen. James Barry Munnik Hertzog, a famous Boer-general of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902 and prime minister of South Africa 1924-1939.

This is but one of the innumerable examples of his capacity to apply his accumulated knowledge with sensitivity and insight to the realities of the day and not to allow the bitterness of his suffering in prison to displace his determined pursuit of reconciliation.

***

On May 1, 1998, I underwent an operation to have my prostate removed due to cancer. That afternoon, after the operation, President Mandela visited me.

When I came to my senses, he was standing next to my bed in the intensive care unit. He took my hand and said, “I have come today to say to you not to worry. You must relax. You have made it. That is all that matters. I went through the same ordeal and I survived. We need you. Get well and carry on.”

This is how I got to know him – an unfathomable human being.

An elder brother.

A person who endured imprisonment for 27 years and then handled the presidency of the country as if he had never spent a single day in jail.

His visit to me in hospital dimmed the pain of the surgery, but mentally I wrestled with remorse over what he had to endure during 27 years of imprisonment.

His conviction in court did not preclude him from adhering to his conviction that black and white needed each other to achieve progress and prosperity for all our people.

He decided that he was not going to allow himself to be governed by hatred and bitterness.

He believed that the inequities and animosities of the past could be ruled out by a charter or bill of fundamental human rights.

He assured us that majority rule would not entail a black majority dominating a white minority.

He emphasized that we live in a country that belongs to all of us, black and white. The black majority will need the white minority to achieve the same level of proficiency in management and craftsmanship.

***

I first met prof. Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicist, in Cambridge on December 12, 1997 and again in Cambridge on March 9, 1999.

In May 2008, Hawking visited South Africa as part of an initiative by the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) to find an African Einstein. His visit was described as the most historic visit to the Cape of Good Hope since Charles Darwin moored here on May 31, 1836 onboard the HMS Beagle.

Having being invited to the event, I flew to Cape Town and also participated, at the request of Hawking, in a TV interview which prof. David Block, astronomer of the University of the Witwatersrand, had arranged.

Stephen Hawking had long coveted a desire to meet Nelson Mandela. The organizers of the Cape Town conference endeavored to arrange a meeting, but Mandela’s office could not fit it in at such short notice due to an overburdened program.

As fate would have it, I had an appointment to meet with Mandela on May 15, 2008. Zelda le Grange, Mandela’s exemplary aide-de-camp, agreed that Hawking and Block could be included in my meeting with Mandela.

I consider it to be one of the highlights of my life that I had the privilege to bring Mandela and Hawking together and to be part of the meeting.

Mandela achieved his “cherished ideal” with an immeasurable endurance of suffering, without having to die for it.
He warded off the temptation to be guided by the bitterness of suffering 27 years imprisonment and resolved to persevere on the road of reconciliation and peaceful negotiations to accomplish his arduous “long walk to freedom” for all the people of South Africa, black and white.

His death is irreversible, his legacy, undying. All of us, the government, the voters, civil society, the churches, are faced with an inescapable challenge: are we going to honor and sustain his legacy or deviate from it.

Indeed, leaders across the globe ought to reflect on his legacy -- particularly while they have the option to resolve disputes through peaceful negotiations instead of violence; abolish all nuclear devices or retain them to destroy our planet; take the quantum leap required to avert the lethal consequences of climate change and the depletion of the planet’s natural resources or enjoy our daily greed to such an extent that it forbids us to preserve our planet for our children to survive.

Roelof Frederik "Pik" Botha is a former South African Foreign Minister who served his country in the final years of the apartheid era.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/12/07/reflections-on-my-relationship-with-nelson-mandela/ 

The Passing of the Great Madiba

The passing of the Great Madiba by Cuan Elgin

It is said to be disrespectful to speak ill of the dead; the presumption being that they are no longer around to defend themselves.

What then does one say of a person who was around for 95 years to defend himself against accusations of being a cunning & deceitful terrorist, responsible for the violent deaths of many innocent South African civilians, both black & white, but yet never did defend himself against these charges in court, pleading guilty thereto, and later even admitting to approving of more terrorist bombings of civilians? He never did renounce violence as a legitimate tool for the overthrow of the state, or apologized to the families of the victims, nor showed any remorse after his early release from a life-sentence in jail.

It is easy to go along with the madding crowd, and eulogize the man, painting him as a glorious freedom fighter, a statesman, a champion of non-racial democracy, a humanitarian, and one of the greatest figures of the age. The fact that he is often depicted as "Africa's Che Guevara" in comparing him to a man who was a sadistic murderer, and who had a very low opinion of African revolutionaries, makes one wonder if those who so admired him, did so through ignorance, or that they hold that "the end justifies the means" in gaining power through violent revolt, or the threat thereof. Some even compared him to Jesus Christ.

It is much harder and less popular to take the other, dissenting view: that he was an unrepentant murderer who brought communism, a sense of entitlement, abortion, pornography, lawlessness and amongst the highest murder, robbery & rape incidence in the world, to South Africa; a formerly conservative, largely law-abiding & orderly country which is, according to many, now unsafe for honest & decent people, and more divided than ever.

For sure, he was a canny showman, a man with the common touch, and he had a sense of occasion. But was he really much more? Some say he was purely an invention of the Liberal Left media and the international communist movement. His biography, his speeches and his widely published sage "sayings" were, by and large, written for him, or merely adaptions of the sayings of other, more original thinkers.

Yet, despite his close friendship with many non-democratic despots, and his thus disingenuous criticism of democratically elected Western leaders, he was feted in the capitals of the world, with receptions befitting an emperor, and will, whether the dissenters like it or not, be an icon of the age, for many years to come.




https://www.facebook.com/groups/313168935217/

Man of Peace?

NOT ONCE did Mandela stand up and say that he was sorry for all the people murdered on his command by his private revolutionary army, Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation", abbreviated MK).

Not once has he repented. Not once did he say that violence wasn't the way to bring about political change. Not once did he say that he was wrong to have killed innocent people using guerrilla warfare and terrorism to try to achieve his vision of a Communist state.

Not once did he ask for forgiveness from the families of his bombing victims.

Not once did he say he was sorry.

No. That would take a big man - a true reformed man of peace - not a coward.

Instead he held all of his Communist principles dear to his heart while the World held him up as a father figure. A man of peace. A champion of human rights.

A champion of human rights?

Where were the human rights of his bombing victims? The innocent men, women and children of all races which he blew up?

Yes, a true champion of human rights - even though he spent his time as SA president cavorting with some of the biggest human rights abusers and dictators in the world.

Sure, sure, he was concerned with human rights, just not the human rights of the people who happened to live in the countries of his dictator friends.

A man of two faces?

Yes, sure if you say so. The problem with that theory is that he never had two faces - only the ones people wanted to see. Mandela never hid who he was. He flaunted it in the face of the world for all to see. The world chose to see the "good" and ignore the bad.

But, but, they say, Mandela was the reason South Africa didn't descend into chaos after the ANC took over.

Again, rubbish!

The reason the country didn't descend into chaos was that the Whites still believed the bill of goods F-wit de Klerk had sold them. They were assured that the ANC would govern for all and that they had nothing to fear. They were placated into a coma by their Churches who told them that handing the country over to the ANC was the right thing to do.

And once the ANC were handed the country on a silver platter, they quickly purged the once feared military of Whites and replaced them with MK operatives. Guns were removed from the general population as Mandela and the ANC knew they needed the White population unarmed and unable to fight back.

And once Whites awoke from their kumbaya coma, it was all too late. The fight had gone, and anger has now replaced the hurt when they realised that F-wit de Klerk had never secured a homeland for the White people of South Africa when he handed the country over - especially for the Afrikaners. A homeland away from the marauding Black hordes - a homeland similar to what Lesotho and Swaziland enjoy within South Africa's borders.

Now it's too late.

That is the reason the transition of South Africa went so smoothly. It had nothing to do with Mandela, but everything to do with traitor F-wit de Klerk selling out the White people. And instead of the world giving Mandela the praise for such a smooth transition, they should be thanking the White people of South Africa.

Today the Whites are money-making puppet slaves for the ANC, living in continual fear of their Black masters. Too scared to put a foot wrong. Too scared to leave the security of their homes.

Of course there's a lot more to what I've written here. So much more to tell. This isn't the entire story. Yes Apartheid would have ultimately failed, but we as a country should have been left to solve the issue, not have been pressured to hand the
country over to a group of clueless murdering Communist idiots.

 


 There he is, standing proudly under the hammer and sickle, with Jewish Marxist Joe Slovo, and his inconvenient ex-wife Winnie "Bring-Me-A-Tyre-Petrol-And-My-Matches" Mandela.

http://ozziesaffa.blogspot.com/2013/12/apparently-saint-nelson-mandela-had-two.html 

The Devil and The Saint

Since this tired old canard keeps cropping up to hit white South Africans over the nose like a rolled up newspaper, I thought it perhaps time to separate fact from fiction once and for all. Let those who object say so now or forever hold their peace. While we're at it, let's put apartheid as a system into perspective.

Do we know how many blacks were killed under apartheid?

We do, and the source is none other than the Human Right Commission submitted as evidence to the TRC in 1997.

The statistics they proffered relate to the number of blacks killed between the years 1948 up to the election in 1994. The total number of blacks killed were 21 000. But wait, it gets more interesting. It's not the full story.

The HRC report also makes a distinction between two periods. One from 1948 till 1989 and the next from 1990 to the election in 1994. The number killed for the period from 1948 until 1989 is 7 000.

That means the number killed from 1990 to 1994 which is AFTER the unbanning of the ANC and for all intents and purposes apartheid had ended is a whopping 14 000, involving mostly black on black violence between the ANC and the IFP and various other factions! Not whitey's fault.

Of the 14 000 killed during those 4 years, 92% of deaths were caused by blacks killing blacks. Only 5.6% were attributed to the Security Forces at the time and usually in retaliation to attacks initiated by the ANC/UDF that had been unbanned. Remember Ciskei? The difference in % is due to unknown causes.

What this means is that during the apartheid reign of 41 years, 7 000 blacks died compared to double the amount of dead in just 4 years! Let me break it down yet further, 170 blacks were killed as a result of apartheid ANNUALLY. That's 170 people per year! That's the HRC figures people! Sounds like an insignificant number now doesn't it?

More blacks then were killed under De Klerk's 'new' anti-apartheid government of 4 years than in 41 years of government under full blown apartheid! How good was the propaganda of the anti-apartheid movement eh?!

Let me summarise, this needs to sink in:
1948 - 1989: 7 000
1990 - 1994: 14 000 (of which 92% as a result of 'black-on-black' violence)

Really, is this the death toll of the "heinous" apartheid system the world grew to hate? Just 7000 deaths? And was it the worst thing to happen in the 20th century? Um, let's look at the Left's favourite socialist/ communist/ marxist/ dictators leaders to name but a few:
• Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39) : 23 million (the purges plus Ukraine's famine)
• Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50) : 78 million
• Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79): 1,7 million
• Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78): 1,5 million

Apartheid: 7 000.

The list of far worse political systems is quite extensive and apartheid wouldn't even feature. But such was the venom against it that the result is a country destroyed. Apartheid was far from the monster it continues to be portrayed. I agree though that it was unjustifiable and unsustainable and just plain wrong and given a do-over, whites would rather leave blacks to find their way than provide jobs and healthcare and other services which caused their population to balloon from 500 000 when Van Riebeeck landed to the almost 40 million in 1994... Facts people, inconvenient little things that keep getting in the way.

https://www.facebook.com/SouthAfrica1994 

"Personally Signed Off"

In his book, ”Long Walk to Freedom”, Peace Laurette, Mandela writes that as a leading member of the ANC’s executive committee, he had “personally signed off” in approving these acts of terrorism : 

1981 – 2 car bombs at Durban showrooms 

1983 – Church Street Bomb (killed 19, wounded 217) 

1984 – Durban car bomb (killed 5, wounded 27) 

1985-1987 – At least 150 landmines on farm roads (killed 125) 

1985 – Amanzimtoti Sanlam shopping centre bomb Dec 23 (killed 2 white women and 3 white children) 

1986 – Magoo’s Bar bomb (killed 3, wounded 69) 

1986 – Newcastle Court bomb (wounded 24) 

1987 – Johannesburg Court bomb (killed 3, wounded 10) 

1987 – Wits command centre car bomb (killed 1, wounded 68) 

1988 – Johannesburg video arcade (killed 1 unborn baby, wounded 10) 

1988 – Roodepoort bank bomb (killed 4, wounded 18) 

1988 – Pretoria Police housing unit, 2 bombs (wounded 3)

1988 – Magistrate’s Court bomb (killed 3) 

1988 – Benoni Wimpy Bar bomb (killed 1, wounded 56) 

1988 – Witbank shopping centre bomb (killed 2, wounded 42) 

1988 – Ellis Park Rugby Stadium car bomb (killed 2, wounded 37) 

Late 1980s – numerous Wimpy Restaurant bombs (killed many, wounded many) 

Our “hero” consistently refused to renounce violence even after he was released.