Mandela did not willingly accept the presidency of a free South Africa
Having served as the figurehead for the South African anti-apartheid movement for over two decades, it would have been very difficult for Mandela to slip into a comfortable retirement and leave the business of negotiating an end to apartheid to someone else. He was seventy-two, and wise enough to realize that political agitation and political office were two widely separate concepts, and he was aware that practical political power could do nothing but harm his reputation. It was he who once said: ‘Power can be a tool or a weapon, but it can never be neither.‘
Negotiating the new South African constitution took several years, and it was not until 1994, after a brutal phase of political violence in South Africa, that the nation was ready for its first experience of universal adult suffrage. The name Mandela had by then achieved almost celestial proportions, and there was certainly no question of who would stand as the ANC presidential candidate, and even less of who would emerge as the victor.
Mandela handled his single term as President of the Republic of South Africa very cautiously, stepping onto the stage of a notoriously treacherous and difficult political theatre. One such difficulty that he faced was in his personal friendship with Colonel Gadhafi, who was by then an international pariah. Mandela made the simple point that Gadhafi had aided the South African struggle, so he was a friend of South Africa.
There were many other similar contradictions that challenged Mandela considerably, and at the expiry of his first term, he was more than willing to hand over power and exit stage left into retirement – his legacy intact, but his fingers burned a little bit nonetheless. If one was to comment on his brief administrative career, then it could perhaps be said that he coasted along on his reputation without doing a great deal. He left the political trenchwork to the succeeding generation of South African leadership, and the result has not always been pretty.