Nelson Mandela’s rainbow republic still struggles to rise from the rubble heap of human misery

At 94 years of age Nelson Mandela has been fortunate to survive an exceptionally long and eventful lifetime. In contrast, the average Black South African male is lucky to survive even half that long. As a political prisoner Mandela and many of his comrades in the African National Congress [all convicted by the previous government of treason and terrorism] received medical treatment when required from some of the best specialists available in the country. Other prisoners were not that lucky and suffered at the hands of their interrogators, or their own comrades while in exile and many died in the often violent battle for supremacy against the Zulu tribe with their rival Inkatha Freedom Party. No love was lost between these two South African tribal arch enemies.

Nelson Mandela’s attempts to reconcile the inequalities and conflicts between the racial and economic divide that has troubled his country is nowhere near complete. The harm that was done to the country as political violence evolved into a culture of crime and hatred will not be easily undone, not by Nelson Mandela’s ANC party. The international sanctions which Mandela and his comrades called for against the Apartheid government of South Africa were equally crippling and economically devastating for his own people who depended on employment by South African entrepreneurs of European descent. The battle in South African against AIDS has been relentless but unsuccessful, largely as a result of sexual permissiveness and ignorance among Black South Africans. But among South Africans of European descent the incidence of this disease is far lower.

Today the living conditions of many Black South Africans under the rule of Mandela’s African National Congress are worse than under the previous government. The traditional socio-economic inequalities of colonial rule that were entrenched by the apartheid system are now entrenched by the age-old feudalism that regulates socio-economic inequalities  on a global scale.

Free, indeed, yes, Nelson Mandela’s people are free……free to be poor, free to be unemployed, robbed, raped, murdered and diseased and it’s probably merciful that at 94 years of age Nelson Mandela is not in a condition to appreciate the extent of the misery experienced by many of his countrymen at the hand of corrupt, super rich, upper-class back and white political supremacists.