Columns

It was the Golden Jubilee of LAWASIA. For four days in August this august body consisting of some of Asia’s legal glitterati met at the BMICH to celebrate the anniversary. It was indeed a memorable occasion.

But the opening was somewhat marred by faux pas. Overawed perhaps by the importance of the occasion and perhaps the presence of President Maithripala Sirisena, the chairman of LAWASIA 2016 performed a rather unusual role of soothsayer. He forecast that Sirisena would be Sri Lanka’s future Nelson Mandela.

President Maithripala Sirisena

Addressing President Sirisena in his opening speech Jayasuriya said this. “It is my belief that history will judge you to be the Nelson Mandela of modern Sri Lanka-the citizen who united our country and its people and created one nation and one people.”
Perhaps, he should have avoided referring to a Mandela in the making before a professional audience drawn from continental Asia in which there were doubtless persons aware of the ‘Mandela phenomenon’, would have warmed the cockles of Sirisena’s heart but it was far from the truth.

It was surely unfair by that great South African who was not only a central figure in the shaping of his post-apartheid country but strongly influenced many African nations and those strongly opposed to the neo-colonialism emerging in the global north.
If Upul Jayasuriya who was a high profile figure in the Bar (Association) before he moved to the Board (of Investment that is) wanted to he could have done so less extravagantly by drawing attention to some of the achievements of the Sirisena government and relevant to the conference. But the thought that Sri Lanka’s history would one day record the transformation of Maithri into Mandela does seem rather extreme.

When reference was made to Sirisena as a “citizen who united our country and its people and created one nation and one people” I was reminded of the words of Samuel Coleridge about the willing suspension of disbelief.

Surely it is hard for even a foreign audience not entirely uninformed of developments in Sri Lanka, to believe that President Sirisena had united “our country” when his own party is passing through rounds of rupture.

Marx (Karl not Groucho) said that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. This seems to be a case of farce trying to make history and sounds more like a biting observation by Groucho rather than Karl.

There seems to be a gap in the understanding of South Africa under apartheid, its emergence into a democratic polity and the internal and external struggle to achieve that historic transformation. For the sake of accuracy and a better understanding of what South Africa was for the majority of its people it would be prudent to look back and ask what Mandela meant for a hugely divided nation, divided between a white supremacist minority and a vastly impoverished, uneducated and unemployed majority denied freedom and justice.

That was the South Africa that Nelson Mandela inherited when he walked out to freedom one February day in 1990 after enduring 27 years imprisonment. It was nothing like the established parliamentary democracy with over 60 years of universal franchise and regular elections that Sirisena came to lead 20 months ago.

There Mandela stood in Cape Town’s afternoon sun, a towering almost mythical political figure. Having suffered all those years of incarceration by an inhuman regime Mandela emerged proclaiming forgiveness for his captors and reconciliation with a hated regime. There were no signs whatever of rancor.

That was the greatness of the man. He bore no ill-will despite the suffering he underwent for nearly three decades of his life and set about the onerous task of trying to unite a deeply divided people and build a new nation. Even if Sri Lanka’s history comes to be re-written, would Sirisena ever come to mean what Mandela meant at that moment in time to the vast majority of black South Africans, the African continent and to the world?

South Africa and the “Rainbow Revolution” that Mandela brought about are too vast and complicated to be discussed in a short column. So it would be helpful to draw on some personal experiences and views formed during a visit to South Africa at a very crucial time in its history.

I was working for the Hong Kong Standard newspaper when Mandela was released in February 1990, a moment looked forward to by the world’s media and people round the world who understood the immense significance of what was to be a historic happening.

I would have commented about the comparison with Mandela earlier except that I was trying to trace some articles I had written 15 years ago for the Hong Kong Standard on my return from a visit to South Africa at a journalistically propitious time when formal and legally legitimized politics was beginning to stir a country struggling to be born.

It was about 15 months after Mandela’s release that I went to South Africa. It was an unbelievable experience to see a country in the throes of what was surely radical change. There was indeed violence in some parts of the country, mainly in Natal, born of an atavistic antagonism between the Xhosa-dominated African National Congress (ANC) and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party of Chief Buthelezi. But this was between two black African communities rather than between the white minority and black African majority entities.

I was there when for the first time in 30 years the ANC was holding a party conference inside South Africa. I wrote at the time that the ANC emerged intact after a bruising conference but with “its credibility somewhat diluted.”

Before the conference sharp clashes were expected between those broadly described as “moderates” and the hard-line communists and “revolutionaries.” The ANC was able to strike a balance between the two tendencies and if it had not proved durable the peace process and the constitution making that was to follow would have failed.

At the conference Mandela even urged a “flexible approach” on the question of economic and financial sanctions the world had imposed on white South Africa, saying that otherwise they will be left “holding a shell and nothing else.” It was a sign of Mandela’s pragmatism and understanding of the political minefield they had to walk through.

He knew that if the white leadership was going to relinquish power it would require delicate and prolonged negotiations. When I was there the two sides had inched closer to a consensus on the broad framework for constitutional reform than they were one year earlier when negotiations began.

But there were still differences between them on the steps necessary to actually get the constitutional talks started.
As the saying goes it takes two to tango. The ANC could not try to over reach itself though there was little doubt that when elections are held it would emerge as the leading party and Mandela would be President.

But the lead up to that stage, the ANC and President F.W.De Klerk’s National Party needed to negotiate the bends on the road ahead carefully. There were many on both sides of the political divide that doubted President De Klerk’s sincerity in wanting to bring about genuine political change. He faced fire from the hardliners in the ANC and the hard line white faction in his own party.

Given the position in which they found themselves Mandela had not only to appease his own party but provide some leverage for De Klerk to convince his own people that the time had come to negotiate a settlement.

It was Mandela’s sensible and balanced approach that helped overcome many of the problems that obviously lay ahead. Given South Africa’s racial mix of African, European and Asian ethnicities in one of the articles I wrote on my return I said that this “multi-racialism means that if the new South Africa is to be welded together rather than be divided by race, it should reflect the ethos of the African, European and Asian cultures. It is this matrix of cultures which gives that country its particular richness.”

“Naturally after all these years of legalized segregation it would be no easy task and it could take generations. But whether South Africa is indeed determined to bury the past and build a new social structure based on freedom and equality that would stand as a beacon for the rest of Africa would depend much on the post-apartheid political system.

If the political leaders opt for a multi-party system with democratic safeguards against exploitation and abuse at the negotiations which should start soon, then one could look forward indeed to what President De Klerk and Nelson Mandela have called a New South Africa.”

That was written a little over 15 years ago. When Mandela was inaugurated as President in 1994 he inherited a country where 50 per cent of the blacks were unemployed, about six million black children had not gone to school, 1,000 people entered the job market every day, half the country’s population was illiterate, 80 per cent of the land was owned by the whites and virtually the entire economy was in their hands. The black majority lived in ghettos in tin and board accommodation they called home.
This was the legacy that Mandela inherited. The enormity of the problems facing that South Africa was stark. It was virtually out of sticks and stones that he had to assemble the new nation.

Sirisena inherited a functioning democracy, a middle-income country and with one of the most literate populations in Asia.