Some stories on Nelson Mandela scratch only the surface. If you believe he was a saint, Mandela is now with the angels. If you’re no believer, you’re probably unwilling to go beyond the simple fact that he’s dead and buried.

The great man himself is said to have always been clear about not being perfect. Which is just as well for someone famed for his modesty and aversion to being treated with adulation. Though gone, many remain caught up in trying to make sense of who he was, what he believed in, what he said, and what he did and did not do for his people.

Failures

There is much popular and academic writing that dwells on his supposed failure to bring about the equality and the good life he and the African National Congress promised to poor and marginalised South Africans, blacks especially, as they prepared to assume power.

This is gratuitous criticism. The man was president for only five short years during which there were more urgent priorities than tackling poverty and marginalisation, important though they were and still remain.

As for the ANC’s failure, there are multitudes of formerly dirt-poor, poorly fed, unemployed and poorly housed South Africans who, only two decades after it took over the government, have jobs, eat better, and live better lives in better housing with access to electricity and piped water, things they could not even begin to imagine under Apartheid rule.

Granted, the ANC and its leaders, like all politicians and political groups pursuing power do, promised more than they could deliver within a short time.
For this reason, those sermonising about failure have a point.

However, 20 years in the life of a country trying to reverse half a century’s worth of entrenched inequality is nothing. Many countries with kinder histories have not done much better than South Africa over the same duration of time.

And on the specific twin issues of poverty and inequality, even the United States, a country far better endowed and arguably better led, is anything but a roaring success when it comes to their eradication.

But exaggeration about Mandela does not stop at what he failed to do; it extends to what he did and even what he believed in.

Consider the idea pushed by some, that his embracing of his “enemies” after he came to power was unprecedented and that no other African leader who fought his way to power or endured extraordinary hardship on the way there has done that.

Not unique

Well, not quite. We have our own examples here in East Africa. In 1986, long before anyone could be sure when or whether Mandela would be released from prison, and long before the wheels of the apartheid system began to fall off, young Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and his National Resistance Movement seized power after years of war.

On their way to power, they literally smashed the army of the government they were deposing, opening the way for them not only to monopolise power, but also to exact revenge on those they had fought, without hindrance. They never did.

Instead they urged their followers and allies to forget the past and look ahead in the interest of peace, stability, and reconciliation with past abusers of power.

They then brought many of those that had served the former government and other potential rivals into the new government. For Ugandans who had hitherto seen governments change followed by bloody purges, this was revolutionary.

Across the border in Rwanda, following four years of war and genocide, and as Mandela and the ANC were embarking on governing with former enemies, Paul Kagame and his Rwanda Patriotic Front gathered some of those they had fought and other potential rivals around a table and formed a government of national unity. They, too, had smashed the old army and could have opted for total exclusion. They never did.

And if I may point out, in South Africa, as the ANC prepared to take over the government, the apartheid military machine, arguably the most formidable army in Africa at the time, was still menacingly intact. A question to ponder: Could the ANC have swept it aside and monopolised power even if they had wanted to?

And now to what Mandela believed in. Many have praised him for giving up power voluntarily, and rightly so, and disparaged, and rightly so, dictators who hug it endlessly, way past their welcome.

They have then gone on to claim Mandela believed in term limits. Well, according to a reliable source, in one long conversation with some important people, the great Mandela wasn’t too sure that in an Africa so bereft of good leadership, it made sense for a good leader doing good for his people and loved by them, to be replaced because of term limits.

As the world mourns, chroniclers of his life story ought to dig deeper.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]