Winnie speaks out

ANC veteran and member of the party’s national executive committee Winnie Madikizela-Mandela has become the latest leader to finger Thabo Mbeki’s government for the country’s woes, including the violence.

In an exclusive interview with the Mail & Guardian she called the xenophobic attacks the worst tragedy in the post-apartheid era. She added that the government’s poor economic policies and lack of service delivery had contributed to the recent wave of violence.

‘Is it not a terrible indictment when, 14 years after our liberation, the minister of housing stands up in Parliament and says she could not build houses because there is no money?” Madikizela-Mandela asked.

‘This is 14 years after the drafting of the ANC’s original manifesto, with which we criss-crossed the country, selling it to our people. This boldly said we will build houses for them.

‘When I went to Alexandra after violence broke out, I saw the same shacks I saw in 1994. I saw the same on the East Rand.

‘When some of us say poor policies and lack of service delivery are a major contributing factor, you then get headlines saying ‘Winnie attacks government!’”

Madikizela-Mandela has been more prominent than any other politician in visiting the strife-torn shack settlements and victims of violence across Gauteng.

On Tuesday she took a Democratic Republic of Congo family from Germiston police station into her care after seeing their one-year-old baby sleeping on the damp floor. ‘That baby would have died there,” she said.

Her first appearance was in Alexandra, where she apologised to refugees, but she has lately spent time on the East Rand, where most of the displaced refugees are living.

Madikizela-Mandela made the startling assertion that Zimbabwean refugees in Alexandra had told her that the violence could have been started by Zimbabweans who wanted to drive their countrymen home to Zimbabwe to vote in the presidential run-off election.

‘That is what Zimbabweans themselves told me. They said this violence was started by fellow Zimbabweans and because in South Africa there are masses of unemployed people it was easy for this violence to spread.”

Quoting Mao Zedong, Madikizela-Mandela said ‘a single spark can start a prairie fire” if the masses are hungry.

Although she did not mention Mbeki by name, she blamed ANC leaders who did not tolerate debate in the party for devising policies that have failed.

She said she and former ANC youth league leader Peter Mokaba had been called populists and ‘the left of the right wing” when they raised concerns about government policies.

‘I made my fears known about privatisation and about the macroeconomic strategy [Gear]. I said at the time: can we go back to the drawing board and ask ourselves why Cosatu is back on the streets protesting our policies? The lack of debate is what has hit us now.

‘The reality is coming to us now. If we had debated policies, we would not have had Polokwane.

‘But no, people were called ultra-leftists and counter-revolutionaries.”

Madikizela-Mandela said the country was now in serious trouble. ‘Our educational institutions are in crisis because we had these mergers, which were totally ill-advised.”

The xenophobia crisis also emanated from the fact that government had not controlled or monitored the number of foreigners entering South Africa.

‘Our borders are wide open and there is an influx into the country which government is not monitoring. Police themselves have admitted that they can’t do border patrols and we have removed all the apparatus which enabled us to man the borders.

‘I don’t think there is any other country in the world where people just come into the country and we don’t know who they are or how many there are.

‘In other countries people go to a centralised place where they are processed. Right now everyone was shocked to see 15 000 Mozambicans being sent home.”

Madikizela-Mandela said what hurt her most was the lack of empathy shown by leaders for the victims of xenophobia.

‘What we see is people standing before TV cameras and condemning. But this situation now is beyond condemning and pontification.”

She said police station commanders whose stations housed thousands of displaced refugees had told her that government was not available to help them draft a plan for the refugees.

‘I was at Cleveland police station, where there are 1 700 people, including 160 children and 70 pregnant women, and you would have expected at least the health officials to be there, but there is nothing.

‘No one is taking responsibility, and station commanders say they are referred from one government office to the next. We have not allocated any government department to handle this situation. We are going there as individuals to help ease the pain.

Madikizela-Mandela said the issue of finding land for the fugitives was discussed at the ANC national executive committee meeting last weekend.

‘But you don’t know if you will be setting them up as easy targets if you isolate them.” She said it was up to the government to find a solution.

‘There are children in these police stations that came up to me, pleading to go back to school. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the minister of social development were to go there and work with them on a plan for them to finish their studies?”

Madikizela-Mandela, who topped the national executive committee list in elections at the ANC conference in Polokwane last year after years of absence from the ruling party’s official structures, said she was not thinking of going back to government next year.

Echoing an ANC mantra, she said: ‘I have never thought of anything. My people always tell me what to do.”