Mandela’s last visit

As former South African President Nelson Mandela said, his visit to Trinidad — fortuitous though it was — would be the last visit that he was paying outside South Africa, probably due to his advanced age and apparently failing health. In fact, one is led to wonder whether Mr Mandela has not made that trip against his medical doctors’ orders. A rare instance of indiscipline on his part, if you ask me. Be that as it may, it has been an undoubted privilege and honour  for us to have hosted this world renowned statesman. Perhaps the most significant feature of that visit was the opportunity given to thousands of school children to pay their respects to Nelson Mandela and to be able, in future, to tell their own children and children’s children that as children they were able to see Mandela in the flesh.

Now, in any other Caribbean country I can think of, the people generally and the high officials in particular would be so overwhelmed by the prospect of such a visit that they would get their act together and make the occasion and the visit a most memorable and controversy-free visit for both Mr Mandela and their country. Common sense dictates that when the international spotlight is upon you you make every effort to present the best possible national image. Everybody understands this except you guess who. Lloyd Best may have a point when he says, “like somebody put light on we!” It’s also true that, sometimes, “The dog that has the teeth doesn’t always get the bone.” Sometimes when we consider how our misleaders mishandle the simplest of our affairs, we tend to blurt out, “Good Lord, please put a hand.” In our current situation, I’m more inclined to ask — nay beg — the good Lord to put, not a hand, but both feet so either foot can administer a firm and unholy kick to each of two well-established backsides: “Viz that of you-know-who and what’s his name.”

Of course, it pains me to have to mention Mr Mandela’s name in the same breath with “our twin towers of galactic stupidity cum ineptitude and rampant political opportunism.” However, in this land low cunning often passes for “intelligence and political acumen.” It should therefore come as no surprise that our political toddlers of Lilliputian stature should have been tempted to attempt to extract the maximum political mileage out of the Mandela visit by engaging in an obscene “tug-of-war” to foist on the dear old man their measly presence and involve him in their squalid political squabbles. At the risk of being lost in space, I’m sometimes tempted to enter the heads (I didn’t say minds) of our local politicians to see what, if anything, goes on in there. There was this idiotic notion that Nelson Mandela could not address a joint sitting of our parliament because he was not a sitting president and that would be “a breach of protocol.” Where is Dr Williams when we need him? Someone once suggested that Williams took us for “a nation of sheep.” It’s now incumbent on us to speak out lest we be taken for “a nation of asses.”

And talking about asses, there is that tendency, at the drop of a feather, to “get on our high horses” (or is it low asses?). And the neighing and braying never stops. The real reason I suspect that someone objected to an address to the joint sitting of parliament was the fear of the possible breach of decorumby the other side in order to embarrass the government, even it meant making thorough asses of themselves, even if it meant making a laughing stock of the country and being disrespectful to Mr Mandela. Of course we’ll never know but one fellow, purporting to speak on behalf of his side, gave the assurance that his side will be on their “best behaviour” during Mandela’s address to the joint session of parliament. Another pipsqueak, known to be singing and dancing for his supper, said openly that he would raise PNM’s infractions with Mr Mandela — as if the poor man did not have enough concerns of his own.

Nelson Mandela must have considered what at best was a gruelling schedule simply because having the 2010 world cup in South Africa must have been very, very dear to his heart. Now let’s for a moment consider this. Six years hence, Mandela will be 92 years of age. Will he have then retired from his retirement?  South Africa would then have had another general election.  I may be wrong on this but I hazard the guess that even if Mr Mandela is still with us and the mind is still sharp and agile then the great man will be concerned with what happens in a post-Mandela era without his sage counsel and his stabilising finger on the political “balance wheel.” Don’t fool yourself, when Nelson Mandela says that he has retired, out of office and no longer has any influence, he’s just being guilty of an understatement.

There’s no doubt that, like Abe Lincoln, it will be said that, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Knowing how brittle and fragile African societies are, it’s not inconceivable that Mandela is preoccupied with a post-Mandela era and his own legacy therein and sees the 2010 world cup as “a magnificent obsession” and a unifying force in his dream of a “rainbow nation.” Mandela’s, Tutu’s, Sexwale’s and others’ pleas to us and Jack Warner to help South Africa “bring home the bacon” is compelling and sincere. And if Warner can deliver then he might even become an honourary African Chief, alongside Sparrow and ANR Robinson. How well that would go down with Jack’s current political associates and detractors is quite another matter.