Word: mandela
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...softened the hearts of his countrymen, but Mandela has concrete accomplishments as well. Every day, more than 5 million pupils at nearly 13,000 schools are receiving a peanut-butter sandwich for lunch-a free meal that provides 25% of their nutritional needs. The children call them Mandela sandwiches. Electricity has been brought to 370,000 homes. Health care is now free for all pregnant women and for children under...
...Mandela and his colleagues have also had practical success managing the economy. For most of its history, the A.N.C. stood by its bible, the Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of Big Business and the redistribution of wealth. Now the socialists in Mandela's Cabinet talk of shrinking government and privatization. For the time being, the government is subscribing to the free-market philosophy that the best way to redistribute wealth is to create it; and the best way to create it is to save money, not spend...
...paramount concern remains the enormous gap in wealth and power between whites and blacks. Whites still control most of the principal institutions of South African society: the corporations, the banks, the stock exchange, the media and the civil service. While Mandela has urged a color-blind society and railed against "reverse racism," whites mutter about blacks taking jobs they are not qualified for. Whether blacks have the right curriculum vitae does not really matter: affirmative action in some form is imperative and inevitable. In South Africa, unlike in America, disenfranchised blacks make up the great majority of the population...
...Mandela's treatment of white South Africans provokes one of the most acute criticisms of his government. Some have accused Mandela of bending too far to assuage white anxieties at the expense of black aspirations. The queen of these populist detractors is Mandela's estranged wife Winnie. When Mandela fired her from a Cabinet post for criticizing the government, there was fear that she might incite a breakaway movement within the A.N.C. In fact, the incident rallied party stalwarts around the President. Winnie found herself with no one willing to defend...
...Nelson Mandela has arrived at an estate in the wine country outside Cape Town where he will dine and speak on economic reconstruction to 75 mostly white businessmen and bankers. He receives a standing ovation. Politely acknowledging the applause, he samples a glass of sweet Weisser Riesling 1993 and jokes about his lack of vinous sophistication. During his last days in prison, he says, he was permitted to have visitors for relatively luxurious meals, and his warder once told him the best wines were dry. "I thought every wine was wet," Mandela says now with a laugh. Not long...