South Africa – an exceptional African country
“South Africans must choose a new crop of leaders that will stand with those who liberated the country”, late president Nelson Mandela's wife Graça Machel said. She was speaking on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the elder iconic statesman’s death – News24 report.
"South Africa, it's in your hands. Stand up and take it...We should get to 2018, having some kind of clarity of who the new crop of leaders are, standing on the shoulders of those we are celebrating," she said. Machel spoke shortly after Sello Hatang, CEO of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, who highlighted how the ANC had failed Mandela's legacy.
Machel warned South Africans to refrain from agonising about the ills of society. It is clear that she meant elements in the liberation organisation that usurped this legacy. They denied the elderly Madiba his anointed deputy who was to implement this legacy through radical economic transformation by imposing a fellow-exile who scuppered it and set the country back on the tragic road towards state capture turned into state robbery by Zupta’s.
It is clear that the very person who was to implement Mandela’s legacy blueprint and now for five years vice-president, is again poised to implement elements of this essential socio-economic policy.
"I wish 2018 will help us to identify, nurture and take them to the heights. This country is extraordinary. It cannot be compared to any other African countries..”
The present mis-rulers who are everywhere on the run had gone out of their way to repeatedly emphasise that we are ‘just another African state’ thereby showing that they are no worse than the others who failed their people. “(We have) to produce a new crop of that collective because it is in the South African DNA," she added. Graça, and the young Afrikaner personal assistant Madiba befriended, were two of the few who remained faithful to him and at his side till the end.
Machel spoke days before the ANC crucial national elective conference at NASREC. It is now up to everyone one of us to generate the necessary faith and resolve collectively to show, once again, that we really are exceptional and proudly to set a shining example to the rest of Africa and the world.
