South Africa faces challenge as Winnie eyes presidency

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): On Sept. 25 and 26 in Johannesburg, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former wife of South Africa's President Nelson Mandela, appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to answer new allegations that she committed or ordered at least five murders. The evidence for her guilt is overwhelming.

Next December, when President Mandela retires as leader of the African National Congress, Winnie will run for the post of vice- president of the ruling party. With the support of radicals disillusioned by the slow pace of change since the end of apartheid, she has a good chance of winning the party post -- and that would give her an excellent shot at becoming the entire country's vice-president in the 1999 national elections.

Last year, when the self-styled 'Mother of the Nation' fought to prevent Nelson Mandela from ending their marriage despite her flagrantly public affairs with younger men, the 78-year-old president described her as "a continuing personal and public embarrassment to me." She is becoming that for South Africa as a whole: it is quite possible that two years from now, a known murderess will be only one heartbeat away from the presidency.

A known murderess, but not necessarily a convicted one, for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is not exactly a court. The TRC was set up to close the books on all the horrors of the struggle that brought about the end of apartheid by investigating victims' accounts, considering amnesty for those who confess their roles in atrocities, and recommending compensation for victims.

But Winnie has not applied for amnesty; the new evidence comes from former members of her gang of bodyguards, known as the 'Mandela Football Club', who have applied for amnesty. For it was they who took the fall when the killings at Winnie Mandela's home in the Johannesburg township of Soweto came to light in 1992.

Winnie was tried and convicted for kidnapping and assault against one of the murder victims, 14-year-old Stompie Seipei. Under what South Africans cynically call the 'Important Persons Act' her assault conviction was quashed on appeal, and her six- year sentence for kidnapping was reduced to a US$3,000 fine -- but Jerry Richardson, her chief bodyguard, got life imprisonment for the murder. Winnie's then-best friend Xoliswa Falati, who provided her with an alibi, was jailed for two years for kidnapping and assault.

It is these former associates who have now applied for amnesty -- and since full disclosure is a condition of the amnesty process, their applications are filled with details that discredit Winnie's alibi and implicate her directly in the killing not only of Stompie but of two other youths, Lolo Sono and Siboniso Shabalala, and a woman, Kuki Zwane. There are rumors that the applications also contain information about further murders, and the location of a mineshaft down which the bodies of the youths were thrown.

Even this might be forgiven Winnie, for all these killings took place under special circumstances. They were done in 1988- 1989, when apartheid still ruled and Soweto, South Africa's biggest black township, was virtually in open revolt. People were being killed by the police every other day, and many others were coerced into being police informers.

It was in this paranoid atmosphere that Winnie and her thugs carried out their murders, and in every case the victims were suspected informers. Suspected on the flimsiest grounds, given no chance to prove their innocence, and savagely beaten and murdered: there is no excuse for what Winnie did. But if that were all that happened, many South Africans would still give her the benefit of the doubt: she may have been drunk with power, deaf to advice, and addicted to righteous rage, but she was not truly wicked.

There are no such extenuating circumstances in the murder of Dr Abu-Baker Asvat. He died, apparently, because he had been called to Winnie's home to examine Stompie before the boy was finally killed, and was therefore a potentially dangerous witness against her.

Asvat's murder was explained away as an armed robbery at the time, but one of the men who did the killing, now serving time in a Durban jail, has now told the TRC that he was actually paid 20,000 rand (about $4,000) for the job by Winnie. And another witness, in hiding overseas since 1989, is now prepared to testify to the TRC that Winnie asked him to drive the killers past Asvat's house.

The evidence is piling up, and it may be enough to bring Winnie to trial again on charges of murder. That would be the most spectacular courtroom drama in South Africa's long history of politically controversial trials, for Winnie is a consummate populist who is still idolized by a substantial proportion of the country's poorest and most desperate people.

There would certainly be huge demonstrations in her favor, and if she were convicted her status in the townships as saint and martyr -- a South African Evita, more or less -- might even rise. But the alternative of not putting her on trial is even worse, for in that case she is all too likely to continue her inexorable climb to power within the ANC.

Things are not going to get easier in South Africa in the next few years: the economy is still not growing fast enough to make any appreciable dent in the huge unemployment among the black population, and there simply isn't enough money to improve education and the social services as fast as the voters want and expect.

Under these circumstances, the power of the radicals in the ANC who want to push democratic niceties aside and get on with redistributing the wealth by force is bound to increase. Winnie is their figurehead (they think) and their manipulator (she thinks).

Either way, they would make a fearsome combination in power, and all the hopes that accompanied the birth of the new South Africa would soon be reduced to ashes.

The choice may well be Winnie in jail in 1998, or Winnie as vice-president by 1999. And that, rather than a love of abstract justice, is why the TRC's investigators have been so diligent in the case of Nomzano Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.