By the standard of African leadership, Nelson Mandela died a pauper
Upon his death, Forbes estimated that Nelson Mandela was worth $10 Million. That is probably an exaggeration. That compared to his nearest neighbor, however, King Mswati III of Swaziland, an impoverished kingdom of southern Africa, who is worth an estimated $100 million, is pennies. Jacob Zuma, the most recently ousted president of South Africa, boasts a net worth of $250 million, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya some $500 million, and the granddaddy of them all Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, who sits on a personal fortune of over $20 billion.
Despite all of that, no one quite knows where Mandela’s modest little nest egg came from. In an article published by the UK Guardian in 2013, a correspondent put that question to the curator of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and was surprised by the reply ‘I don’t know.’
And in fact, that might be true, since Mandela himself was notoriously air-headed when came to money and affairs of many, so it is probably that someone behind the scenes simply capitalized on the Mandela name. During the height of the anti-apartheid movement, for example, Winnie Mandela was accused of virtually franchising the Mandela name, which certainly would have spun significant revenue under any circumstances.
The bottom line, however, is that Nelson Mandela was as clean as a whistle. All of the other African presidents listed above are and were corrupt, of that there can be no doubt. Mandela, however, suffers from not one sniff of financial impropriety, which is, of course, central to his legacy.
, Mandela’s longtime friend and lawyer George Bizos remarked once: ‘If anyone suggests he’s a multi-millionaire, they’re wrong. He’s not a rich man. He has a couple of trusts for his children and grandchildren. His earnings are technically nil, other than the goodwill of people inside and outside South Africa who helped with the education of the children. He has always insisted that money donated should be used for building schools and hospitals.’