http://www.iol.co.za/anc-leadership-bar-set-too-low-1.1148763
Warren Bennis, the celebrated leadership thinker, begins his book, On Becoming a Leader, by recalling the cover story of the Time magazine edition of November 1987, which posed the question: “Who is in charge”? Answering its own question, it went on to proclaim: “The nation calls for leadership, and there is no one at home”.
How true this is of South Africa today. One reason South Africa is deprived of credible political leadership is that the very process of selecting political leadership is not designed to reward excellence.
Leadership succession is determined through the dictatorship of the party over society. It is for this reason that the wall of mystery surrounding leadership succession within the ANC should be assailed to allow for a more open discussion on South Africa’s leadership options and the possible directions the country should take beyond Jacob Zuma’s presidency.
There are two other important reasons why a publicly driven succession debate is important.
The first is that the character of political leadership has a powerful impact on the nature of the country’s institutions and the quality of its future – politically, morally and economically. There is little doubt that for the foreseeable future the ANC will continue to dominate the South African political landscape and act as a party that produces presidents for the nation – however flawed these may be. The consequences of morally and intellectually defective leadership could be extremely damaging and difficult to reverse.
Shaping the public discourse on the ANC’s leadership debate, therefore, becomes crucial. The imperfect and indeterminate process of leadership selection in the ANC is nowhere as evident as the manner in which Zuma came to power. He did not become the party and the country’s president because he was the most gifted, ethically grounded, and the most competent.
It may well have been for the opposite reasons. There was nothing in him that inspired confidence. Rather, it was through a series of adventures, misadventures and politically manipulated means that he was able to ascend to the highest office in the land.
Zuma became president simply because his faction had its way. His slate was more popular to those who either falsely saw in him an image of a messiah, or an avenue through which they could access power and plunder state resources. Zuma’s rise to power was very much facilitated by a deadly cocktail of political manoeuvring and illegality, including the use of illegally obtained spy tapes to get him off the hook and to pave the way for his rise to the Union Buildings.
He came to power with no credibility to stand on. As such, the office of the president lacked decorum.
It is, therefore, not inconceivable that under different circumstances Jacob Zuma could be mingling with criminals behind bars. What is most troubling, though, is less about Zuma’s politico-ethical character, but more the very process by which the ANC selects its president who then has the seamless passage to become the president of the country.
Given what we know now and have as the country’s president in the person of Zuma, it is possible that the ANC selection process could churn out a leader who makes wrong judgements that could very well compromise the vital institutions of the state. It is not difficult to imagine the emergence, through this faulty mechanism, of a president who attracts wrong characters around him, who is driven by instincts of self-preservation to the detriment of the country’s future, and who can quite easily become a serious national security threat. This is especially so as the ANC’s leadership bench is growing thinner, and the edifice of its values manifesting deep cracks.
The virtues, political finesse, and statesmanship that were expressed in the colossi that were incarnate in Chief Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, and Nelson Mandela are worlds apart from the decadence that became visible post-Mandela and towards the ANC’s Polokwane National Conference in 2007. What we witness today is a painful spectacle akin to a contest between dwarfs who stumble to climb on each other’s shoulders with the hope that the successful among them will attain the stature of a giant.
Having achieved the feat, so does one dwarf announce from the shoulder of another that a new standard has been set on becoming a giant, and that others have to emulate his example. There is, without a doubt, a massive difference between today’s and yesterday’s leadership in the ANC and the country.
The second reason why this debate is too important to be left to the ANC factions is the fact that the glue between the party and the state is hardening, and with worrying implications for the stability of the country and the core institutions that underpin it. There is, according to the ANC’s logic, one centre of power – Luthuli House – and government’s policy processes, civil servants and institutions are subordinated to this warped logic. It is the same logic that would have us believe that the wisdom of independent institutions such as the judiciary is inferior to that of the party with all its disparate factions and chaos.
Given this unsettling, if not unseemly, fusion between the party and the state, and with the elevation of the party above society, the massive leadership failings within the ANC could very well accentuate dysfunctionality in the state. Recently, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe painted a bleak picture of a party bursting at the seams, infested with factional battles, that has become a hive of corruption, and is populated with ill-disciplined cadres. Welcome to the new vanguard of South Africa.
Mantashe’s assessment of an imploding ANC was followed by a similarly bald revelation by Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde, minister of public works, who lamented that “we have allowed thieves and thugs to run the country”. She may have been trying to pass the buck under the pressure of the public protector, but her observations should be taken as a reflection of a particle of reality that could be worse than what she has revealed.
The question she, and the collective leadership of the ANC, should be asked to answer is who exactly has opened the door to thieves and thugs, and where do they get the licence to loot? And what if their role models are the very figures that are piloting the party and the state?
At the heart of this growing disintegration lie massive failures of leadership and, in particular, Zuma’s lack of grasp of key challenges in his own party and in the state. There are numerous tell-tale signs of this dysfunctionality. Apart from Mantashe’s candid assessment and Mahlangu-Nkabinde’s alarming remarks, institutions that should be insulated from politics, such as the judiciary, prosecutorial agencies and intelligence services, are casualties of this poverty of leadership and political meddling. The fall-out between the ruling political elite and civil society over the information bill has produced some spirited, but foolish, attacks by the ANC Chief Whip Mathole Matshekga on the Constitutional Court.
What of the shambolic handling of the tensions between the senior intelligence officials and their political head? If the intelligence services are not able to conduct their affairs discretely, how much worse is the situation in other government departments and agencies? The chaos in the intelligence community is one of the dangerous consequences of an incestuous relationship between the party and the state in a pluralistic democracy like South Africa. The unsavoury events in the intelligence services are a fragment of what could be a much wider disintegration of state institutions under Zuma’s watch.
We ignore the centrality of leadership at our peril. History is replete with examples of leaders who either inspire a sense of self-belief in their nations or throttle their hopes; who inspire greatness in their people or bring them shame; and who nurture trust and integrity in the country’s institutions, or self-servingly erode them. The leadership bar in South Africa has been lowered drastically.
There seems to be no one at home worthy of the title of leader, if the ANC selection processes are anything to go by.
Readjusting the bar upwards may require that we intensify our scrutiny of the sitting president, and influence the leadership succession debates in the ANC even before they begin in earnest, as it will be too late then.
Wondering endlessly over how we got to be where we are may not help us to cure the country’s leadership ills, the creeping dwarfism, and the growing dysfunctionality characterising state institutions.
Dr Qobo is a Political Risk Analyst, Public Speaker, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria. He is also a member of the Midrand Group.
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