Keep walking, Radebe tells emotional MPs

Justice Minister Jeff Radebe moved several MPs to tears during a special joint sitting of Parliament on Monday when he vowed that former president Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom was not over.

“Madiba, your long walk to freedom has not ended. It is just the passing of an era,” he told those attending a parliamentary session held in tribute to Mandela.

“We pick up your speed, to continue [the] long walk toward the economic emancipation for all....”  Radebe compared Mandela to a large tree that had fallen.

“The baobab has fallen. The world will never be the same again.

A pledge we make to you... is that as a nation, we will keep on walking.”  Earlier, politicians at the tribute broke into song and dance in Mandela’s honour.

“Rolihlahla, freedom is in your hands,” Congress of the People MP Dennis Bloem sang during his tribute speech. Rolihlahla was Mandela’s middle name. Other politicians responded: “Mandela, Mandela” and got up to dance.

Speaker Max Sisulu soon called the House to order.

When Bloem raised a hand to his head in a military salute, many in the gallery following suit.

The Assembly benches and the public gallery above were packed to capacity when Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe took to the podium to open the tribute speeches.

Mandela was a man of “mythic proportions”, he said, calling on South Africa and the world to consider how his legacy might be carried forward.

“The litmus test, however, is whether the inheritors of his dream, heirs to his vision and adherents to his philosophy, will be able to make his dream, for which he lived, come to pass in the fullness of time.”  Motlanthe called for an examination of the current world order, and the “numbed” senses of world leaders, who had the power and wealth to banish poverty, but had not done so.

“Why then do the majority of the world’s people, the great unwashed, live in abject poverty, when a fair distribution of the world’s resources would not even minimise the material comfort of those who wallow in luxury?” he asked.

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Mulder, North West premier Thandi Modise and Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille also paid tribute to Mandela.

Mandela’s grandson Ndaba Mandela represented the family at the sitting, placing his right hand over his heart when the national anthem was sung, just as his grandfather had done.

In an interview with BBC World News, Mandela’s eldest daughter Makaziwe Mandela described his final days as wonderful, because he had been surrounded by his loved ones.

“They [the doctors] told us Thursday morning that there was nothing that they could do, and said to me: ’Maki call everybody that is here that wants to see him and say bye bye’....

“I think from last week Friday until Thursday it was a wonderful time, if you can say the process of death is wonderful, but Tata had a wonderful time, because we were there...”  As South Africans gathered at key sites throughout the day, Public Service and Administration Minister Lindiwe Sisulu stopped at Mandela’s home in Houghton, Johannesburg, where he died on Thursday, and told reporters she was taken aback by the public’s response.

“This is what I think he deserves. What he has given us, nobody in living memory would have been able to do what he has done,” she said.

She remembered meeting Mandela as a girl, and how tall he seemed to her.

“His voice was louder than everybody, the belly laugh that just rocked even the chair where he was sitting... he’s just everything that I’m proud of.”  On Monday, the Robben Island museum announced it had lit a candle in prison cell number five, where Mandela spent 18 years of his imprisonment.

A memorial service for Mandela will be held at FNB Stadium, in Soweto, on Tuesday. More than 100 dignitaries are expected to attend.

His state funeral will take place on Sunday in Qunu in the Eastern Cape, where he spent his early childhood.