Thatcher fades away like a wild flower

Rich or poor; ruler or subject; armed or unarmed; titled or nameless, we shall all pass away like a wild flower.

Dear Tingasiga:

The death of Margaret Hilda Thatcher, late prime minister of Great Britain, though not shocking, has cast a chill on my world, one that she dominated so totally for more than a decade.

She is one of the leaders that I admired and respected greatly, though I disagreed with a lot of her policies and practices. She coddled dictators. I loathed them. She declared Nelson Mandela and the ANC terrorists. They were my heroes. She opposed sanctions against South Africa. I felt that the sanctions did not go far enough.
She attempted to frustrate Robert Mugabe’s ascension to the leadership of an independent Zimbabwe. Though I would later on regret it, I was then an enthusiastic supporter of ZANU-PF and its leader.

She was always at loggerheads with Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere over the South African question. I cheered the Tanzanian leader during his intellectual combat with the Iron Lady.

Her immigration policies betrayed a xenophobia that would later be revealed after her death to have been racist. The Australian Foreign Minister disclosed last week that Thatcher had advised him to ensure that Sydney would not be taken over by Asian immigrants.

One was not surprised by the visceral opposition that she triggered both at home and abroad. One could not be indifferent towards her. No surprise that many Britons still hate her even in death. Their primitive celebrations of her demise, more than 22 years after she was forced out of office, reveal the power she continues to wield over them.

Perhaps I liked Thatcher because she was everything I wanted to see in a leader. She believed in something, stood up for it and spoke in the plainest English for all to hear. With Thatcher, what you saw was what you got. And of course she was honest with public money. She was frugal in life and remains so in death.

It was often said that she was “the only man” in her all-male Cabinet. Her force of personality and her unshakeable belief in conservative socio-economic values turned Britain upside down, and offered a template for the privatisation and the structural adjustment programmes that were embraced by many countries in the 1980s and 1990s.

Her opinion mattered, whether on Zimbabwe or apartheid S. Africa; whether on nuclear arms or international monetary policies. British military and security services, along with the political establishment and civil service were under her command and service.

She was as militant as her enemies. She humiliated the Argentinians in the Falklands War of 1982. She took on the Irish Republic Army and weakened them. Not even their attempt to kill her in Brighton in 1984 shook her resolve to fight them. She fought British trade unions and left them dazed in the dust.

In the Cold War world in which she operated, she turned Number 10 Downing Street into a power centre equal to the White House and the Kremlin, the first British leader to do so since Winston Churchill. The lady towered over the world more than any other woman did in the 20th century, perhaps in all recorded history.

Yet when she died last week, at the age of 87, Thatcher, frail, helpless and deprived of her mental faculties, was almost alone in a hotel suite in central London, only attended by a caregiver and her doctor. Not even her children were with her. Not one of her cabinet ministers was present.

Not a single soldier from the fighting units she had dispatched to war theatres in ages past was by her bedside.
This week, Thatcher’s remains will be cremated. The Iron Lady will be reduced to ashes. Her commanding voice will remain stilled in eternal silence. And the world will continue its journey, as though Thatcher never lived. If that does not humble you, Tingasiga, I don’t know what will.

A humbled Thatcher is hard to imagine, but one hopes that as she run her last lap she internalised the words of James 1:9-11: “The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business.”

As one reflects on Thatcher’s death and legacy, one is humbled once again by the inevitable reality of one’s own mortality. Rich or poor; ruler or subject; armed or unarmed; titled or nameless, we shall all pass away like a wild flower.

One hopes that this great and once powerful woman had, in her last years, knelt before the cross of Jesus, surrendered herself to His mercy and saving grace and received her passport to an eternal life that is guaranteed only to those who believe Him. (John 3:16). In the end, that’s all that matters.

Dr Mulera is a Daily Monitor
columnist based in Canada.
muniinikmulera@aol.com