Justice was served in South Africa. Mike du Toit, the ringleader of a white supremacist militia called Boeremag, was given the heaviest sentence of 35 years over a botched 2002 plot to overthrow the post-apartheid government, kill Mandela and drive blacks out of the area.

However, du Toit did not act alone, and was not the only one sentenced. The judge at the High Court in Pretoria sentenced the rest of the 20 militia members on trial to between 10 and 30 years depending on their degree of involvement in the plot, National Prosecution Authority spokesman Medupe Simasiku told AFP.

All 20 accused were convicted of treason, but only five of murder and the plot to kill Nelson Mandela. But, most of them will go home free men, because the judge will take into account time spent imprisoned awaiting trial, which lasted almost a decade. Boeremag members were convicted in August last year. These were the first guilty verdicts for treason since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Had Mandela, a Nobel peace laureate, not flown to the Limpopo province to open a rural school on that fateful day in 2002, he would have been killed by a landmine that was planted by Boeremag, causing mass chaos. One woman died and dozens of people were injured in the blasts that shook the Johannesburg township, Soweto in October 2002.

The Boermag, which is Afrikaans for “Boer Force”, a reference to the first dutch colonisers, had a long-term plan to fill South Africa with blood and chaos in order to reach their goals.They then intended to take over military bases, replace the government with white military rule and purge all blacks and Indians from the country. Sadly, there were a father and two sons among those sentenced.

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