KEY POINTS:
No offence was meant, presumably, but it still felt vaguely insulting to see Nelson Mandela identified in the photo caption of a British newspaper as a "black leader", as it would be to see Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln - whose statues are, like Mandela's - in Parliament Square - described merely as "white leaders".
To identify Mandela by his race is to diminish him, and to miss the point of the magnanimous example he gives us.
Pity, then, about his successor, Thabo Mbeki, who chose the month when Mandela is immortalised in bronze to remind us of just how far short he falls of the best his country has to offer. And to show how strong a candidate he is to rank, with his friend Robert Mugabe, among the worst presidents in the world.
The backdrop is Mbeki's twisted relationship with Aids, a disease that affects one in nine South African people and kills 900 of them a day. Specific events this past month concern two women, rivals in South Africa's Aids drama.
There is former Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, whom Mbeki fired on August 8, and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in whom he has retained total faith.
Beyond the sycophants who surround Mbeki and his loyal-to-a-fault Cabinet, the consensus is widespread that he fired the wrong minister, and in so doing laid bare the wilful ignorance and criminal neglect with which he has responded to a humanitarian crisis of such vast proportions that any half-decent leader anywhere else would not hesitate to flag as his country's overwhelming priority.
Yet Mandela's heir, the man charged with preserving the admirably principled tradition of the African National Congress, behaves as if South Africa's Aids disaster is no such thing. It is as if another of his rivals for worst president, George Bush, were to pretend the Iraq war was a little local difficulty.
During Mbeki's first five-year term, he used to say, with the enthusiastic backing of his Health Minister, a doctor, that Aids was not a sexually transmitted disease and that the anti-retroviral drugs that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives throughout the world were poisonous.
He also said he knew no one who had Aids. Since then, Mbeki has been bludgeoned into grudgingly starting to have anti-retroviral drugs handed out.
The Government's official policy on Aids today is medically sound at last. But Mbeki continues to show an abject lack of leadership, indicating - as his firing of the deputy Health Minister shows - that he is less than half-hearted in his commitment to the cause. So the big question of South African politics - What the hell is going inside Mbeki's head on Aids? - remains unanswered. Because he is otherwise a rational, intelligent man.
While Mbeki has battled with repression, the crisis has cried out for Diana-like theatrics. He should have gone out into the worst-affected areas and held the hands of Aids patients; he should have publicly celebrated the Lazarus-like return to life of people on the anti-retroviral programmes.
Above all, he should have gone out of his way to set people straight on Aids, to counter the ignorance and confusion he himself has sown, contributing immeasurably to the scale of the catastrophe.
Mandela, well into his 80s, has done all that and more.
But out of Mbeki, not a peep. His tragically ludicrous Minister of Health continues to go about creating the impression that beetroot and garlic are just as effective in countering the effects of the HIV virus as anti-retroviral medication.
Madlala-Routledge was the only person in the Government with the courage to defy Mbeki, both by pushing hard for the new strategy on Aids - approved last March, when Tshabalala-Msimang was on sick leave, recovering from a liver transplant - and by showing active leadership on the matter.
That made her a much respected figure in the global Aids community. As such, she was invited to an international conference, held in Madrid in June, on the latest work in the search for an Aids vaccine.
She accepted the invitation because of the opportunity "to make a strong case on behalf of the victims" to the scientists and European parliamentarians at the conference.
She flew to Spain, but barely had she landed in Madrid than she received an order from Mbeki to fly straight back.
Which she did, but that did not prevent Mbeki from firing her. The reason? That she had flown to Madrid without his permission.
Since then, the South African press has published reports on the alleged alcoholism and stealing of her former boss, Tshabalala-Msimang.
Under the front-page headline, "Manto: a drunk and a thief", the Johannesburg Sunday Times claimed the Health Minister continued to booze after her transplant, and revealed that in the 70s she was expelled from Botswana for stealing from patients at a hospital where she was a medical supervisor.
Beyond the office-holding ranks of the former heroes of the ANC's liberation struggle, the clamour has been insistent for the reinstatement of Madlala-Routledge and the firing of Tshabalala-Msimang.
Mbeki's response, typical of the small-mindedness that defines him, has been to order the former deputy Health Minister to repay the Government for her trip to Madrid.
He seems oblivious to the callousness of the message he is sending in persisting with the buffoonish Tshabalala-Msimang, a drinking buddy of long-standing, in a ministerial post that Mandela would have considered the most important in his Government by far.
* John Carlin is writing a book on Mandela, to be published by Penguin Press.
- Guardian
