ohannesburg - Nelson Mandela means a lot of things to people not just in South Africa, but across the world. There is indeed no denying that he was an ANC member; even he will insist on his home and make as that of the ANC. Still, Mandela belongs to the world, indeed to all.

For the Left, and many militants, Mandela is one of those figures that create so much ambiguity and internal turmoil, not least because he is claimed by traditions hostile to the revolution. Liberals in the DA and conservatives in the Freedom Front Plus all associate with Mandela; he is made to have stood for all, making it hard to make him an exclusive figure of militant revolution.

There is no undoing of the powerful international “figure of all” that Mandela has become. Thus, many in the Left secretly harbour deep resentment and at times disappointment that he did not insist on the radical politics that made him and saw him imprisoned for many years. Ordinary people have also been caught saying he is a sell-out.

Well, it is true that it was not the message of peace, reconciliation and rainbowism that put him behind bars, rather those militant programmes – nationalisation, free education and most of all the taking up of arms to fight apartheid violence.

Some on the Left can say all they want – in the end Mandela’s bravery, selflessness and collective spirit are traits many today fail to emulate. His ability to challenge power and face consequences that may endanger his life, including death, remains largely unparalleled. In short he is the best of that generation of fearless fighters who sought to end apartheid.

But Mandela also belongs to a collective whose interpretation of South Africa’s colonial problem separated the “political” from the “economical”; what in narrow Marxist terms they called the base (economy) and the superstructure (state).

This separation, which if applied actually appears real, saw the attainment of political rights as the first step in the achievement of the liberation of blacks. It does not help of course for radical militants to keep on insisting today that it was a wrong interpretation; we now live with its legacy – a dichotomised liberation.

This dichotomised reading of society in many ways became useful in negotiations with hardliners within the white supremacist world, where Mandela’s generation agreed not to tamper with private property, and that democracy would only be limited to the ending of all segregation laws – separate toilets, benches, freedom of association and movement, including marriage between races.

Meaning of those things that the majority can decide on, the economy is not part; essentially it kept the economy away from what the vote can decide.

Although today it seems an easy and rather simple thing to demand, it was not the case in the past as the colonial white world brutally refused to give this right. It viewed blacks as incapable of participating in politics as their equals and they killed a lot to keep them out of that world.

Sharpeville, for instance, was about burning passes and not necessarily occupying white-owned land or going on factory strikes – burning passes, that in the everyday perception represented the refusal of black people to freely move about. Black people needed permission to be in South Africa.

Fighting for equality before the law and for the universal franchise – the right to vote, and stand for office – was at the time revolutionary. This is indeed the potent gift of Mandela’s generation and it remains an important contribution to the liberation of black people nonetheless. For the first time, it made direct white minority rule difficult, if not impossible.

But Mandela went on to preside over the implementation of macroeconomic policies that undermined his own gift.

In 1996, Mandela’s government adopted neoliberal policies of privatisation, outsourcing and inflation targeting.

These policies took meaningful state property and sold it, including closing down institutions such as teacher colleges. At this stage, only white people had money, so they bought all that was sold. In the end, the state that the franchise attained for black people was stripped of the power to deliver black people a second stage where they could “do economic freedom” – so that it was a baseless superstructure. For the past 20 years, neoliberalism has kept this base away from direct influence by the superstructure and now it seems natural to think of the two as separable. But the state can get involved in the economy. That is what it did to exhume Afrikaners out of poverty – it owned factories, reserved jobs for them and built universities to advance them. Yet the democratic, most legitimate state is refused this access.

The right to vote, Mandela’s gift, is however not completely adulterated and this is why it is a potent gift. In it still lies the power of the majority to decide – a democracy. We can still use Mandela’s gift to vote for land expropriation and nationalisation without compensation for equal redistribution. Nothing stops this.

Even if we cannot claim a militant Mandela for ourselves, no one can refuse us the universal gift he gave our generation – the right to vote and to use it to bring economic freedom; to use the superstructure to decide the base.

Come 2014, this is what honouring Mandela will mean – giving ourselves economic freedom through the vote. This is his potent legacy and only true gift.

* Mbuyiseni Ndlozi is the spokesman for the Economic Freedom Fighters.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.