Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
from Reuters Soccer Blog:
Back on Robben Island — the men who changed the game
The year 1964 was a highly significant one in the fight against Apartheid: Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island and FIFA suspended South Africa from football because of the legalised racist policies of its Government.
If anyone had suggested then that one day FIFA's Executive Committee would meet on the outcrop off the coast of Cape Town on the eve of the draw for South Africa's World Cup, they would have been derided as a fantasist.
But that is exactly what happened on Thursday. FIFA president Sepp Blatter and the 24 most important men in world soccer, plus around 250 members of the media and other helpers, spent a day on the island where Mandela, and current South African President Jacob Zuma were incarcerated for years of their lives.
Thousands of opponents of the Apartheid regime were imprisoned on the island, but for FIFA, and for the world at large, Robben Island is not just a sombre place with a dreadful past, but it is also a symbol of hope.
It is where oppressed and imprisoned men turned to football as a way of regaining their dignity and humanity which the Apartheid regime was determined to deprive them of.
While Blatter and FIFA's decision-makers were in session, the world's press were introduced to other men who all did time on Robben Island, and who, in 1967, literally set the ball rolling which eventually gathered enough momentum to bring the World Cup to South Africa -- and FIFA to Robben Island.
A new way forward is needed in Sudan. The western advocacy groups have raised the discussion to a shrill scream that defies any relief politically or socially. Save Darfur…didn’t. The problems of the country lie in Khartoum’s central government, the same group of people that waged war on the south, Nuba, the East and Darfur. The same group of people that broght the terrorist players into their country for safe haven. Have they changed and have guilty conscience now? No! They take tactical steps to maintain power, confuse those who threaten their power, and fool outsider players. Conquer and divide is in fact the strategy of those in power in Khartoum. The South is weak but still the major political player with any chance to influence a political transformation. The constant scream about Darfur doesn’t help Sudan. Their should be a much broader and substantive engagement with all of Sudan’s issues and change is going to be slow but it needs heavy and constant US/Eurporean/China support.
Will South Africa’s poor always back ANC?
It’s one of the biggest ironies in South African politics — the most loyal ANC voters are often those the party appears to have let down most bitterly.
For millions of poor, mostly black South Africans, life has barely changed since the African National Congress defeated apartheid under Nelson Mandela in 1994.
Year after year, they wait for the new house, the job, the running water and electricity, the decent education for their children that the ANC has promised. For many, that never comes. Yet most will still vote for ANC and its leader Jacob Zuma in an election next week.
The poorest residents of Munsieville, a township on the edge of Johannesburg, illustrate the contradiction.
Unemployed and tired of living crammed into one-room shacks with no running water or electricity, they are quick to list the ways their government has failed them.
Hundreds share one water tap, which sits next to a stinking mound of rubbish where dirt-smudged children play and stray dogs scavenge for food. They dig pits for toilets.
Many say they have languished for years at the bottom of waiting lists for decent housing. They were left behind while others enjoyed a decade of continuous economic growth that created a burgeoning black middle class.
First, what is needed is South African politics is a credible opposition politics. Currently, all opposition political parties lack the credentials for stronger opposition and winning the previously disadvantaged majority. Second, race politics is still a very long way to go in South African political stage – it’s the way things are and will continue to be so for a good while until a ‘political miracle’ happens. Clearly, both 1 and 2 require some kind of a political school for all of us in South Africa.
S.African Election: Democracy in tatters?
William Gumede is the author of “The Democracy Gap: Africa’s Wasted Years” and ”Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC”.
South Africa votes on 22 April with not only its globally admired efforts to build democracy in tatters, but against the backdrop of many other promising attempts to build viable democracies across Africa now backsliding.
Military coups, such as the recent one in Madasgascar, assumed to be part of Africa’s terrible past, appear now to again have become a regular occurrence. The election earlier this year of Muammar Gadaffi – who himself came to power by military coup in Libya – as leader of the African Union, by his peers, is symbolic of the continental regression.
When South Africa became democratic in 1994 with Nelson Mandela at the head, it was hoped that the new democracy at the southern tip of Africa would provide a powerful home-grown impetus for expanding democracy across the continent.
And it initially looked promising, with Mandela’s exemplary moral leadership; and his successor Thabo Mbeki’s initial efforts to champion an African economic, social and democratic ‘renaissance’.
However, soon the African curse struck: Mbeki’s moving rhetoric did not match actual day-to-day practice. While preaching democracy, Mbeki clamped down on internal dissent, packed public watchdogs with uncritical loyalists, and looked the other way when allies were shown to be corrupt or incompetent.
It is inconceivable that the ruling African National Congress, with Jacob Zuma at the helm, will not win South Africa’s national elections. Formidable charges of corruption were dropped against Zuma after the acting head of the national prosecuting authority emphasised that the case against the incoming president was solid, but that possible political interference in the timing of whether to press charges against Zuma made the authority reluctant to press ahead.
In fairness, it should be noted that other “democracies” are not that much better than the African ones, and some non-African “democracies” have interfered in Africa to the detriment of its development and democracy – e.g. bribing politicians (e.g. while the arms corporations might actually have done the bribing they have been assisted and protected by their home governments).
