This is my country's fourth front, with the three already open in surveying and defending both eastern and western borders and fighting terror in our midst via Fitna al Khwarij and Fitna al Hindustan. While the latter three consume most of our resources, the first in the list takes most of our time. This is true for at least the government in power, and what constitutes politics in this blighted nation we call home. You can blame it on the man, incarcerated and behind bars and now quiet, or those on the outside, apparently free but consumed by this one man who can neither be seen, nor heard, nor named.

Nelson Mandela was put out of sight for twenty-seven years, even if he could not be put out of mind, but there was no visible impression through a popular reaction to his being jailed by the apartheid regime in South Africa. I haven't read much on him or on South Africa of those times, but for the Blacks to hold a sentiment against the White minority for being maltreated at their hands when the entire world had given up on this inhuman treatment of men, would only be instinctive and natural. They did not require a Nelson Mandela to sensitise them on the need for their freedom.

Freedom is germane to human existence, even if it takes twenty-seven years to arrive. But for those twenty-seven years, South Africa ran as a controlled, even if apparently normal, state — I say so from the perspective of a state, even if it needed ruthless repression of the Blacks to quieten them to absolute submission. The Whites, for those years, ruled over the country and its resources.

We are talking time here. The time........

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