Mandela's greatest feat was saving South Africa from a bloodbath, current President Zuma has plunged it into violence, corruption and poverty. By John Humprhrys and Stephen Robinson By John Humphrys Hope: Nelson Mandela's legacy is to show what a clear-sighted, courageous, determined, resourceful and, above all, generous in spirit can achieve in political life The first rays of sunlight were starting to break through the smoke haze of a hundred thousand coal fires rising into the cloudless sky above the biggest black township on the African continent. This was Soweto on a chilly autumn dawn in 1994. The following day, 20 million black South Africans would be free to vote in democratic elections for the first time in their lives. The government had opened some polling stations a day early for the very old and disabled who might want to beat the crowds the next day. I had driven out to Soweto hoping enough people would have taken the opportunity of that early vote to give Radio 4's Today programme a decent lead story. They had. From every polling station great queues snaked into the distance: grannies leaning on their sticks; old men in wheelchairs; young women with bulging, pregnant stomachs. For an election that had not formally begun, this was already a turnout to gladden the heart. My editor in London asked me to do a live broadcast from a polling station. I chose an old woman to interview who looked as though she might deliver a lively couple of minutes and asked her: 'What will this vote mean for you?' Her first answer was disappointingly low key. 'For me, it means little,' she said. This was not what I'd expected or wanted. Then she patted the stomach of the young woman next to her. 'But for the young man in this woman's belly, it will mean everything. He will have the dignity that has been denied to me all my life. In that one sentence she encapsulated the achievement of the man who died on Thursday night. I asked the women next to her what name she would give her new baby. I think I knew what the answer would be. Nelson. What else could it be? Three days later, I stood in the dangerously overcrowded ballroom of the largest hotel in Johannesburg, deafened by the roar that greeted the arrival of the hero at his victory party. Nelson Mandela. The first black president of South Africa. Over the years that followed, Mandela would become the most respected, the most revered, statesman of his time, his name a byword for courage and honour, humanity and humility, compassion and forgiveness. In towns and cities around the world, public buildings and streets would bear his name and the Nobel Peace Prize was merely one of a thousand honours to be bestowed on him. Mandela would become the most famous figure of his time, his moral authority unquestioned, his autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom, required reading for anyone who wanted to understand something of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. In these sceptical times, when our leaders struggle to gain our respect, it is tempting to suggest that no single figure can really be worthy of such adulation. Nelson Mandela, after all, was not unique. There have been other great liberation leaders. He was not a great military hero like his English namesake or a brilliant scientist who changed the way we understand the world or a Churchillian figure who led his nation to victory with the power of his oratory. He himself acknowledged that during his five years as president he failed to achieve one of the two great aims that he spoke of at his inauguration: to bring prosperity to black South Africans. Historic: Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie, walk out of the Victor Verster prison in Paarl, near Cape Town in 1990, after Mandela had spent 27 years in jail The fact is that millions of them still live in the most appalling poverty. But he did succeed in his other great aim: to reconcile a country divided by race for so long. To create a rainbow nation of people who would be, in his words, 'assured of their inalienable right to human dignity.' To understand Mandela's achievement you have to go back to the old South Africa. When I first went to Johannesburg to set up a television news bureau for the BBC, he had already been in jail on the notorious Robben Island for 12 years. The apartheid regime he had sworn to bring down was tightening its grip with increasingly draconian laws. The more isolated it became on the world stage, the more savagely its leaders reacted to protests at home. In 1976, high school students in Soweto had staged a peaceful demonstration against apartheid and were met with murderous force. Hundreds were shot dead. I went back for the anniversary a year later, and once again the police turned on the protesters with gas and guns. Black people were not only treated as a sub-species of humanity, unfit to share the same schools or hospitals or post office queues as white people, but were denied the vote and their basic rights as citizens. They were even denied the very citizenship of their own country. They were deemed to be citizens of bogus tribal 'homelands' created by the regime. Those who were allowed to live in the 'white' towns and cities could do so only in shacks in the gardens of the whites. Their sole purpose was to serve the needs of white people. They were barred even from living with their own husbands or wives. Mandela could have done what some other educated black people did: collaborate with the system or struggle to modify it. I remember a conversation I had at the time with another very brave man, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I asked him whether, given the apparent invulnerability of the regime, that might not be the wisest approach. 'Young man,' he said, 'we do not want to modify apartheid. We want to destroy it. Which was exactly what Mandela had set out to do when he took control years earlier of the youth wing of the ANC. He instantly became a wanted man and proved so elusive he earned the nickname The Black Pimpernel. But he cut an unlikely figure as an underground leader: he didn't even own a pistol. Eventually he was arrested and convicted in the infamous Rivonia trial of sabotage, treason and violent conspiracy. Struggle: Under apartheid black people were not only treated as a sub-species of humanity, unfit to share the same schools or hospitals or post office queues as white people, but were denied the vote and their basic rights as citizens His speech from the dock reverberated around the world. And in South Africa it removed any doubts as to who was the leader of the struggle. His words send a tingle down the spine to this day: 'I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an idea which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, my Lord, if it needs be, it is an idea for which I am prepared to die. When he walked free from Robben Island 27 years later, Mandela's moral authority was unquestioned. In prison, he had behaved with stubborn dignity. He showed respect even for the men holding him captive. He learned their language, the language of the oppressors, so that he could talk to them and understand them. Mostly, as he wrote later, they talked about football. His quiet modesty and self-deprecating manner never left him, however many honours an admiring world bestowed on him. Everyone wanted a piece of him, to share in the Mandela magic, and he seemed almost to be surprised by it all. When he came to Television Centre, he was approached by a South African musician who was performing in the studio. Mandela went to shake his hand, but the man bent down on one knee and bowed his head. Mandela shook his own head in disapproval. When I interviewed him, he made me feel as though I were the person who mattered. Difference: Unlike Robert Mugabe, Mandela's former comrade in arms in the neighbouring Zimbabwe, Mandela did not use his new power to punish, humiliate or even slaughter those who had sought to destroy him. Instead, he worked with them Even for a cynical old hack, it was hard not to feel overawed by the man. And never once did he seem to glory in his victory over the old regime. The contrast with neighbouring leaders could not have been more absolute. President Hastings Banda in Malawi went nowhere without a great gaggle of adoring, ululating women wearing T-shirts emblazoned with his picture. He had me locked up once for asking what he deemed an impertinent question. And unlike Robert Mugabe, his former comrade in arms in the neighbouring Zimbabwe, Mandela did not use his new power to punish, humiliate or even slaughter those who had sought to destroy him. Instead, he worked with them. Forty years ago, I had little enough idea what to expect from my posting to South Africa. In my first week there, the British ambassador, who told me he spent his days with his fists 'permanently half-raised' in case of attack, told me to prepare for the worst. In those dark days it had seemed inevitable to him and to many others that, sooner or later, the 20 million oppressed black people would rise up and demand equality. And equally inevitable that they would be met by overwhelming force and that South Africa would descend into chaos and, ultimately, bloody civil war, taking the rest of southern Africa down with it. But it did not happen. And that, surely, was Nelson Mandela's greatest gift to his country and to his continent. He leaves something else, too. Perhaps the most substantial part of his legacy is symbolic. He stands as an icon, an image of what a human being as clear-sighted, courageous, determined, resourceful and, above all, generous in spirit can achieve in political life. He stands as an example to all who follow him. STEPHEN ROBINSON, who was there when Mandela was freed, on the man now plunging South Africa into violence, corruption and poverty Tainted: President Jacob Zuma is the embodiment of how the African National Congress, the oldest liberation movement in the world, has rotted from within Yesterday, I telephoned an old friend in Johannesburg to commiserate with her about the death of Nelson Mandela. What depressed her, she said, was not so much the passing of her 95-year-old political hero, but having to watch his successor announce it to the world. "To see Jacob Zuma standing there in front of the TV cameras made me feel sick," she said. He is the absolute opposite of everything Mandela believed in and lived for. As the world watches the Mandela obsequies being played out, a preening President Zuma will be the awful spectre at the wake, escorting presidents, prime ministers and princes around the ceremonies. He is the embodiment of how the African National Congress, the oldest liberation movement in the world, has rotted from within and abandoned its founding principles as the defender of the poor and powerless black majority. On the very day that Mandela died, a crisis was approaching in a long-running scandal about £14.5 million of state money used to upgrade Zuma's private home in a dirt-poor part of rural Zululand. After colluding with Zuma in keeping an official report into the project secret, the ANC this week gave in to pressure and said South Africans do indeed have the right to know how their money was spent. It is likely that the opposition in Parliament will make token efforts to impeach Zuma, but equally certain that because the public is so inured to corruption, he will be re-elected president in next year's elections. Not that Zuma is alone in funnelling state money for his own benefit. Today in South Africa, no road is built, no hole dug, no airport terminal extended without the payment of kickbacks to the politically well-connected. In life, Mandela - who, as a foreign correspondent, I watched walk free from prison near Cape Town on February 11, 1990 - held his nation together. Today the country faces uncertainty. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said this week: "What is going to happen to us now our father has died?" True, Mandela was scarcely well for the past five years or so, but that did not matter, for his very presence - weak as he was - served as a restraining force against those who might push too far against the ideals of the transition to democracy. When he lived, he was a symbol of hope, and a warning of what might have been had the last white President F.W. de Klerk not had the courage to free him, and had Mandela lacked the grace to reciprocate with peace and reconciliation.Now he's gone, the stage is left entirely to Zuma, a self-described "100 per cent Zulu boy," a polygamist and homophobe who has taken six wives and fathered 20 children, most of them paid for, one way or another, by the South African taxpayer. Stabilising force: Though ill much of the last five years, Mandela's presence served as enough of a balance against President Zuma's influence on the political climate of South Africa In a conscious disavowal of Mandela's pleas for non-violence and non-racialism, Zuma peppers political rallies with performances of an old ANC guerrilla song, Bring Me My Machine Gun. This is a man who was acquitted on rape charges after explaining to the judge that the alleged victim was wearing a short skirt: "In Zulu culture, you cannot leave a woman if she is ready." When it was pointed out that the woman was known to be HIV positive and that Zuma had not used a condom, he famously explained that he had taken the precaution of showering after the act. Since Mandela retired as president in 1999, South Africa has plunged down the international rankings of good governance. A recent survey found that very nearly half the South Africans who required a service from a government official in the past year had been required to pay a bribe. If township dwellers want a water pipe extended to their home, they have to grease palms. In the Johannesburg suburbs, the police set up road blocks next to cashpoint machines so motorists can readily get money for the bribes to avoid having to waste hours at the police station on trumped-up driving charges. These hazards may seem relatively trivial. We are talking about Africa, after all, not some immaculately democratic Swiss canton. And, for sure, most South Africans still feel an overpowering sense of relief that their just departed leader steered the ship of state away from racial warfare when he was released from prison nearly 24 years ago. Yet still, the downward trajectory is disturbing. And the great fear, now that Mandela is no longer there, is that South Africa could spiral ever more rapidly into decline. Last photo: The picture shows the former freedom fighter sitting mute in an armchair, his head propped up by a pillow and the tell-tale marks of an oxygen mask on his cheeks, as South African president Jacob Zuma grins into the lens and squeezes his hand We in Europe must take our share of blame for the country's embedded corruption. Much of it was established as far back as 1998, when our defence companies offered tens of millions of pounds in bribes to secure contracts as the South African government under Mandela sought to upgrade its weapons capacity.The foreign arms companies polluted the South African political well, and ever since it has been getting more and more toxic. The result of this rampant corruption is that South Africans - especially the young - are increasingly rejecting the political process. Matters are not helped by the fact that there are no jobs for millions of young South Africans who complain the ANC now entrenches for the black elite what apartheid did for whites. It is true that the old apartheid state was corrupt. Sanctions, and the secrecy they impose on all manner of trading deals, are always a great boon to the corrupt officials looking for a backhander. It was also, as we know, brutally repressive. I lived in South Africa for much of the Eighties, and I'll never forget the police commander who was asked by a foreign journalist whether it was strictly necessary for his men to fire live rounds at protesting school children who were hurling bricks. "When they throw rubber rocks at us, my men will fire rubber bullets at them," the commander replied, as though the journalist was just a little bit dim. What is so depressing today is how much of that abhorrent apartheid mind-set has survived the transition to black majority rule. The South African police always used to be brutal in apartheid days. Today, they are not only brutal - they are corrupt from top to bottom. Compelling evidence is now emerging that 34 striking miners killed last year at the Marikana platinum mine in the north of the country were actually the victims of a pre-planned police ambush. In the worst traditions of South Africa in the apartheid era, this grotesque police massacre was obscured from public view as long as possible by the authorities. According to a recent survey, the two least respected groups in South Africa are the police and the judiciary. When criminals are caught and charged, the wealthy can find a way to bribe the police and prosecutors to ensure they never go to court. For years, South Africans have fretted about their country after Mandela, and worried what the future will bring. Uncertain future: It is likely that the opposition in Parliament will make token efforts to impeach Zuma, but equally certain that because the public is so inured to corruption, he will be re-elected president in next year's elections When Mandela walked free from jail, white South Africans worried the country could be convulsed by mayhem. They thought, or at least they claimed to think, that black South Africans would indulge themselves in an orgy of tribal violence, pitching tribes such as the Zulu and Xhosa against each other. It did not happen then, and will not happen now. South Africa will not descend into total chaos; it will not "collapse." But even under a man with the skill, charm, and steel of Mandela, the country came perilously close to disaster. And it is impossible to see how it can do anything but become more dangerous, more corrupt, and more impoverished under the shabby leadership of a "100 per cent Zulu boy."