Let Madiba be and look at the ANC

On Saturday, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley said she was hurt Nelson Mandela was labelled as a sellout, while she gave the 20th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the Durban International Convention Centre in KwaZulu-Natal.

“If there’s any one single truth, it is that each of us runs our leg of the relay, the baton is all that they can be required of us to carry,” Mottley said.

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It is easy to forget the violence which wracked South Africa leading up to the 1994 elections.

In its submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on human rights violations during the apartheid years, Sapa reported the Human Rights Commission said during the 46-month period starting in 1990, there were 14 000 deaths and 22 000 injuries.

For three years, about 260 victims died every month on average and, in the 10 months prior to the elections, the monthly average jumped to 460 deaths.

Of course, blame for the violence can be widely spread, with the AWB having killed 20 people in car bombings, and the ANC’s Shell House massacre, which saw 19 people killed, not forgetting the Boipatong Massacre in June 1992, which left 45 people dead.

When Chris Hani was assassinated in 1993, Mandela talked the country off the precipice of a full-blown civil war.

And while he took part in the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) negotiations in 1991, it was with a mandate from the ANC.

Despite all the problems, on 27 April 1994, now known as Freedom Day, elections were peaceful.

Today’s ANC carries the scars of Marikana (34 dead), and the June riots, which the entire security cluster fumbled, with at least 276 people dead.

The ANC has always said it worked as a collective, so who is really responsible for where the country is today?

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