This year signifies 103 years since Oliver Reginald Tambo was born in this month of October, in the village of Kantila, Eastern Cape. It is not an exaggeration that Oliver Tambo and his generation embodied an exceptional consciousness or culture into the service of others whose objective was the total liberation of the African people.

Oliver Tambo, born in a colonial, exploitative, and oppressive South Africa, against all odds, grew up to become a respected global icon where ordinarily a black person was relegated to a second class citizen. Whilst the are contradictory aspects to the leadership of Oliver Tambo and whilst it is also dangerous to whitewash and always sing praises to a leader, the science of contradictions and dialectics sanctify Oliver Tambo as a rare breed who always demonstrated remarkable integrity, selflessness, and discipline.

The literature on the weaknesses, challenges, and victories that took place under the leadership of OR Tambo is well documented and I will not wish to reinvent the wheel nor agitate what has been documented about OR Tambo; but it is remarkable how Oliver Tambo was able to deliver an intact ANC when it was unbanned in 1990, despite internal ideological contradictions and many other ebbs and flows that engulfed the organisation when OR took over in 1967.

In 2012, as a keynote speaker at the Oliver Tambo an unwavering commitment to serve the people of South Africa with no expectation of any personal gains

• The commitment of his enormous intellectual capacity and personal energy to pursue the objectives of the National Democratic Revolution;
• His ability as an outstanding strategist to lead the broad forces of the National Democratic Revolution through the twist and turns of an everchanging and therefore dynamic national, continental and international situation;
• Ensuring that the revolution did not lose its focus on its fundamental goals;
• A master tactician of the National Democratic Revolution which enabled him to identify the tactical maneuvering which would be imperative to sustain the advancing of the democratic revolution towards its victory;
• His capacity to communicate well-thought-out, clear and relevant messages to the national democratic movement about its tasks at all times, which reassured everybody that there was a purpose to their actions and a positive end-game to their sacrifice; and
• His ability to ensure the cohesion of the forces of the revolution.

OR Tambo undoubtedly embodied the ethos of selflessness and commitment to the principles and value system necessary for the advancement of the democratic revolution and unity of the ANC. These core values were also personified in the passion that OR Tambo had for ‘education for liberation’ and the youth as custodians of the fu ture necessary for the victory of the democratic revolution.

In 1991 at the 48^th National Conference of the ANC, cognisant that a new era of minority rule was coming to an end and a new era of majority rule under the custodianship of the ANC was imminent, OR Tambo said, “Before I sit down, of progress at times. We were always ready to accept our mistakes and to correct them. Above all, we succeeded to foster and defend the unity of the ANC and the unity of our people in general. Even in bleak moments, we were never in doubt regarding the winning of freedom. We have never been in doubt that the people`s cause shall triumph.”

Not our cause but the people’s cause.

Whilst the primary agreement since the inception of the ANC has been the return of the land and liberation of Africans, theoretically articulated as the “liberation of the Africans in particular, and black people in general from political and economic bondage”, black Africans remain at the bottom of the social-economic hierarchy continuously trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty whilst expected to contend with the middle and elite class in an environment which does not nurture or explore their genetic intelligence.

Our system in totality has bred mediocrity, illiteracy, disease, gender-based violence, and poverty whilst sustaining unequal patterns of ownership of the economy.

It is under the ANC of Oliver Tambo that we have produced a dual economic and education system with extremely opposing results which “socializes the elite of the next generation” whilst on another hand producing a populace which cannot do for itself but characterized by a culture of entitlement and rendered redundant and dependent on RDP houses and social grants.

It is, therefore, my submission that the majority of South Africans, in particular the African majority, have become tired of the liberation rhetoric. They have seen in more than two decades a leadership that says something else and does something else, they see right through our deception, our public fights, our criminality, our animosity towards each other, and our refusal to implement policy resolutions whose aim is to liberate the people from economic bondage. They are confronted by a system that has created a few black elites and sustained White privilege and structural racism.

The ethos and values of OR Tambo have been overshadowed by a vanquished and defeated liberation movement compounded by an education system which prepares learners and graduates for capitalist exploitation rather than preparing them to be self-reliant and self-sufficient as espoused by Oliver Tambo who was an emissary for “Peoples education for Peoples Power”.

In ‘My Country and the World’ the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev who pledged solidarity to OR Tambo and the ANC in the dark days of apartheid stated that, “History teaches us, that when the times are ripe for change and the government refuses or is unable to change, either society starts to decay or a revolution begins”.