ANC trying to contact Winnie over Mandela remarks
2010-03-09 16:31
THE ANC was trying to contact MP Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to find
out if she really said Nelson Mandela had let down black people, an official
said today.
“She is in the US now and we are in the process of trying to locate
her,” said African National Congress spokesman Ishmael Mnisi.
“We want to ask her if these comments were made by her; if this is
exactly what she said.”
Mnisi denied a report that she would be called to explain herself
at the next national executive committee meeting next week.
“That is not correct. What we said is that we would wait for her to
verify if these reports are truly attributed to her,” said Mnisi.
The struggle stalwart lashed out at South Africa’s first
democratically elected president, who is also her ex-husband, in an interview
published in the London Evening Standard this week.
She said Mandela had become a “corporate foundation” who was being
“wheeled out to collect the money”.
Madikizela-Mandela also called Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu a
“cretin“, in the interview with Nadira Naipaul, who visited her with her
husband, the writer VS Naipaul, in Soweto.
“Mandela let us down,” said Madikizela-Mandela.
“He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically, we are still
on the outside.
“The economy is very much ‘white’. It has a few token blacks, but
so many who gave their life in the struggle have died unrewarded,” said
Madikizela-Mandela, in the interview published on www.standard.co.uk.
She said Mandela had no control over the ANC anymore and was just
being used by the Nelson Mandela Foundation to get funds.
“Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control
or say any more. They put that huge statue of him right in the middle of the
most affluent ‘white’ area of Johannesburg. Not here where we spilled our blood
and where it all started.
“Mandela is now a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally
to collect the money and he is content doing that. The ANC have effectively
sidelined him but they keep him as a figurehead for the sake of
appearance.”
Madikizela-Mandela said Mandela was not the only leader who
suffered.
“This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family.
You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were
many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died.
“Many unsung and unknown heroes of the struggle, and there were
others in the leadership too, like poor Steve Biko, who died of the beatings,
horribly all alone.
“Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young
revolutionary. But look what came out.”
Madikizela-Mandela criticised him for accepting the Nobel Peace
Prize with the apartheid government’s last president, FW de Klerk.
“I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel [Peace Prize
in 1993] with his jailer [FW] de Klerk. Hand in hand they went.
“Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart?
He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed, and our struggle was
not a flash in the pan, it was bloody to say the least and we had given rivers
of blood.
“I had kept it alive with every means at my disposal.”
She also lashed out at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
process, criticising Tutu, its chairman.
“Look at this Truth and Reconciliation charade. He [Mandela] should
never have agreed to it.
“What good does the truth do? How does it help anyone to know where
and how their loved ones were killed or buried?
That Bishop Tutu who turned it
all into a religious circus came here.
“He had the cheek to tell me to appear. I told him a few home
truths. I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting
here because of our struggle and me. Because of the things I and people like me
had done to get freedom.”
Looking back, she said the movement’s actions were badly
planned.
“You know, sometimes I think we had not thought it all out. There
was no planning from our side. How could we? We were badly educated and the
leadership does not acknowledge that. Maybe we have to go back to the drawing
board and see where it all went wrong.”
- SAPA