Damn, I needed to make concessions in order to fend off a political foe, but I hadn't yet purged my activist leaders of extremists and replaced them with moderates, and now it's too late because the USSR was overthrown so I no longer could get the intelligence I would need to do so. Meanwhile I'm not on speaking terms with my one moderate activist after doing too many arms trades. So now we don't get free elections. Damn't Gorbachev, couldn't you just have kept things together a little while longer?
We tend to think that there was a certain amount of inevitability to the end of white rule in South Africa. However, there were LOTS of things working against the ANC. For instance, if the Rwandan genocide and the civil wars in the Congo had happened earlier in the 1990s, I am not sure white South Africans would have agreed to free, multi racial elections. There was also a real possibility that South Africa would break up into several states due to the huge diversity within South Africa. Despite all this, Nelson Mandel got the job done, and South Africa is a unified, democratic country.