[I was trying my bl**dy damndest for days now to see if I could get by without mentioning Mandela’s birthday. You’d think it was the birth of Jesus the way they carry on here. And all one sees in the media for days on end, God help me, is Robben Island… Robben Island… Robben bl**dy island… and then 46664… 46664 – his stupid prison number. And so it carries on. When he dies, they’ll probably build a pyramid or something. I am so sick of seeing Mandela on TV every damned day, with all this “Father of the Nation” rubbish which goes along with it.

And to top it all, Bill Clinton seems to now have the habit of annually flying to South Africa for Mandela’s birthday. I can’t stand Mandela. And I can’t stand Bill Clinton either. Both, in my view, are fakes. Mandela is no saint – he’s just a Marxist terrorist who escaped the gallows – and Clinton is a Marxist who committed more crimes than any other American President in history – and got away with them all. So I suppose the two have a lot in common. They can discuss all their crimes and how they got away with them. Jan]

Former United States president Bill Clinton received a superstar’s welcome when he addressed a group of young community volunteers at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, on Tuesday.

“Hold still, hold still,” he said as he tried to sign a young performer’s drum while people around him jostled to get closer.

A woman with a copy of his memoirs, My Life, pushed the paperback over everybody’s heads, spelling her name, and a group of female drummers leaned in for a photograph with him, while around him drums pounded amid excited chatter.

Youths from the volunteer group City Year vied with besuited executives for a closer look at the man who once multitasked between heading a world superpower, brokering peace deals, ordering foreign raids, being shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize and dealing with the personal and political fall-out of an office fling.

“You were great today,” he wrote on the drum of performer Nicolette Sebatane.

Reporters and photographers rushing to file their stories tried unsuccessfully to leave the auditorium, which had been sealed off “for security reasons”. This had earlier included instructions to draw the blinds on the windows of the auditorium.

Clinton is in South Africa as part of a six-country tour of Southern African projects in which the Clinton Foundation is involved.

This includes providing anti-retroviral therapy in paediatric HIV/Aids units and helping plan responses to the disease.

His Tuesday-morning meeting was to thank the City Year volunteers for the maths, science and technology tutorials and for the life-skills programmes they provide within their communities as part of the Presidency’s goal of encouraging youth volunteering.

In its first year of operation, the project is similar to a US initiative and was developed over four years in South Africa after former president Nelson Mandela heard about it in an exchange with Clinton.

Its R11-million funding comes mostly from South African companies with some funding from various government departments. Clinton’s foundation does not fund the local version, but lobbies for international support for it.

With co-chairperson Murphy Morobe, who once campaigned against the apartheid government, Clinton said: “When the struggle for freedom and equality was going on here, civil service was defined as a willingness to go to jail … to stand up for people against your own well-being.”

He said Mandela had told him of his concerns about the limitations of the new government and the challenges that remained, and commended the volunteers for filling those gaps.

Their after-school work is particularly valuable for children whose parents work and are unable to help them with their homework.

“Nothing is more effective over time than after-school programmes,” he said. “Nothing kills hope more than getting up every day, day in and day out, and being ground down by circumstances that never change.”

Even though recent bombings and attacks show that there are people who think their differences are more important than common humanity, there is such a global pull together that it will either cause an implosion or unprecedented unity.

He said he has lived beyond his dreams and is currently spending a lot of time working on the HIV/Aids problem.

“I have decided to make sure that nobody younger than me dies before their time,” he said.

Drawing on the African concept of ubuntu, he said: “I am because you are. God bless you.”

Gifts presented to Clinton included a pair of US sized 13-and-a-half “ubuntu boots”. Mandela was not present at the event, which was billed as an “imbizo”. — Sapa

Source: Daily Mail & Guardian
URL: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articlei…/p>