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A MAN, NOT AN ICON
Mr Mandela's triumphal progress t irough the United States before coming to Britain was instructive, if not edifying.
Here was modern mass politics in all its superficiality, the continuation of show business by other means. One would hard- ly have guessed that the political and economic destinies of 30 million people were at stake: it was the triumph of packaging over product.
Despite Mr Mandela's admirable qual- ities — his personal dignity, his lack of rancour after many years of imprisonment — he is manifestly not a political leader of great stature. He sees in the totalitarian oppression of Castro's Cuba only freedom and justice; he has declared himself hon- oured to appear on the same platform as Puerto Rican extremists who shot five United States congressmen on the floor of the Congress itself; he has not dissociated himself from Colonel Gaddafi; he has called for talks between the British Gov- ernment and the IRA on the grounds that 'differences have arisen' between them, and he has never expressed regret at his wife's egregious remarks about freeing South Africa by dousing people in petrol and setting them alight. Far from being a man of peace, he begins to sound like a man who believes that any grievance justi- fies any violence.
His thinking on economics is muddled, and displays wilful ignorance — or worse.
In an interview with a German publication in June, he still chattered happily about the African path to socialism. Which path, one wonders, is that? The Sekou Tourean or Macias Ngueman path that reduced their respective populations by a half in a few years? Or perhaps the Kaundan path, which has merely cleared the shops of food and other goods for decades while the weeping President's family accumulated a huge fortune? Maybe he refers to the
Nyererean path, which required the herd- ing at gunpoint of 80 per cent of the•
peasantry into socialised villages, averting an economic catastrophe only by accepting billions of dollars of Scandinavian aid in the name of self-sufficiency. Failure on such a scale to learn from the experience of others can be attributed only to the very Poorest of judgment. Mr Mandela felt able to assure his interviewer that the African masses wanted nothing to do with capitalism. He did not explain how he came to this rather sweep- ing conclusion, but it was certainly not by consultation with either the masses, who have never shown any reluctance to con- sume what capitalism produces, or other political groups. In an interview given to an American publication during the same month, he said he failed to see the import- ance of talking to his rival, Chief Buthelezi — not a very auspicious beginning to the multi-party democracy to which his orga- nisation is now said to aspire.
The adulation that Mr Mandela received in the United States was therefore quite inappropriate. The suppression there by the press of inconvenient facts incompati- ble with Mr Mandela's status as secular saint illustrates the power of the liberal conscience to censor without any external
compulsion to do so. It has to retain the illusion that for every evil, such as apar- theid, there has to be an equal and opposite good.
Our own bastion of this wishful, and fundamentally dishonest, thinking, the Guardian, has suggested editorially that Mr Mandela's unfortunate remarks con- cerning the IRA were the consequence of jet lag, thus fatuously ignoring the in- numerable occasions on which its hero, well-rested and with his feet on the ground, has proclaimed himself the friend of any thug with a gun and an ideology. It is possible that leaders do not always mean exactly what they say: but until they reach power, we have nothing else by which to judge them. The Spectator has been warn- ing for a long time (Leading article, 6 August 1988) that Mr Mandela should be treated as a man and not as an icon: a man, moreover, with often objectionable views.
Alone of world leaders, Mrs Thatcher has had the courage to oppose the collec- tive tide of bien pensant madness for no obvious political gain. Alone of world leaders she has had the intelligence and foresight to realise that the question of South Africa is not the question of apar- theid, which cannot be maintained even if the ANC refrains from bombing supermar- kets, but the question of whether the banks, mines and other businesses are to be packed with abjectly incompetent poli- tical appointees who will soon reduce the country to chaos and possibly to starvation. South Africa needs conservation at least as much as it needs change, and it is impera- tive that economic expectations among the black population which cannot possibly be met should not be aroused.
The South African question is one that displays the Prime Minister at her best. Pugnacious in defence of common sense, she will not be swayed by high-sounding, conscience-soothing phrases. If South Afri- ca transforms itself peacefully, its people — of all colours — will have reason to be grateful to her.
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