Pranesh Prakash on Mon, 9 Dec 2013 10:07:32 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Mandela/Madiba |
michael gurstein [2013-12-06 15:58]: > As we recognize, mourn and celebrate Mandela/Madiba it might be worthwhile > to circulate and examine the > <http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=188939> draft South > Africa ICT Policy Framing paper > www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=188939 > > > > This paper, I've been told by a Community Informatics colleague who is on > the SA Government's Task Force that produced this document, explicitly (as > in section 3.5 where principles are presented) draws inspiration in large > part from the ANC's > <http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/internet-justice-a-meme-whose-time > -has-come/> Freedom Charter (1955) http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=72 > which guided Mandela and his ANC colleagues over the decades and as they > approached the work of Government. John Pilger writing in Counterpunch on how the ANC and Mandela let South Africa down (July 11, 2013): http://goo.gl/HVmq3t [snip] I had asked him why the pledges he and the ANC had given on his release from prison in 1990 had not been kept. The liberation government, Mandela had promised, would take over the apartheid economy, including the banks – and “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Once in power, the party’s official policy to end the impoverishment of most South Africans, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), was abandoned, with one of his ministers boasting that the ANC’s politics were Thatcherite. “You can put any label on it if you like,” he replied. “ …but, for this country, privatisation is the fundamental policy.” “That’s the opposite of what you said in 1994.” “You have to appreciate that every process incorporates a change.” Few ordinary South Africans were aware that this “process” had begun in high secrecy more than two years before Mandela’s release when the ANC in exile had, in effect, done a deal with prominent members of the Afrikaaner elite at meetings in a stately home, Mells Park House, near Bath. The prime movers were the corporations that had underpinned apartheid. Around the same time, Mandela was conducting his own secret negotiations. In 1982, he had been moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison, where he could receive and entertain people. The apartheid regime’s aim was to split the ANC between the “moderates” they could “do business with” (Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo) and those in the frontline townships who led the United Democratic Front (UDF). On 5 July, 1989, Mandela was spirited out of prison to meet P.W. Botha, the white minority president known as the Groot Krokodil (Big Crocodile). Mandela was delighted that Botha poured the tea. With democratic elections in 1994, racial apartheid was ended, and economic apartheid had a new face. During the 1980s, the Botha regime had offered black businessmen generous loans, allowing them set up companies outside the Bantustans. A new black bourgeoisie emerged quickly, along with a rampant cronyism. ANC chieftains moved into mansions in “golf and country estates”. As disparities between white and black narrowed, they widened between black and black. The familiar refrain that the new wealth would “trickle down” and “create jobs” was lost in dodgy merger deals and “restructuring” that cost jobs. For foreign companies, a black face on the board often ensured that nothing had changed. In 2001, George Soros told the Davos Economic Forum, “South Africa is in the hands of international capital.” In the townships, people felt little change and were subjected to apartheid-era evictions; some expressed nostalgia for the “order” of the old regime. The post-apartheid achievements in de-segregating daily life in South Africa, including schools, were undercut by the extremes and corruption of a “neoliberalism” to which the ANC devoted itself. This led directly to state crimes such as the massacre of 34 miners at Marikana in 2012, which evoked the infamous Sharpeville massacre more than half a century earlier. Both had been protests about injustice. Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid. He saw this as part of “reconciliation”. Perhaps he and his beloved ANC had been in struggle and exile for so long they were willing to accept and collude with the forces that had been the people’s enemy. There were those who genuinely wanted radical change, including a few in the South African Communist Party, but it was the powerful influence of mission Christianity that may have left the most indelible mark. White liberals at home and abroad warmed to this, often ignoring or welcoming Mandela’s reluctance to spell out a coherent vision, as Amilcar Cabral and Pandit Nehru had done. [/snip]
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