Steven Friedman
worm’s eye view
If Martians ask you to take them to our leader, try Lucas Radebe. The Bafana captain is a more plausible source of national leadership than any of our politicians.
Our lack of leadership is of some importance. We have descended into the politics of meanness, of bad-tempered bickering as we cling to the familiarity of our sectional selfishness rather than the broader vision of the mid-1990s. And that is in no small measure due to leadership failures.
It used to be fashionable to insist that leaders did not matter in history. The fate of societies depended on social forces, not on what great individuals did.
We should know by now that while leaders are always restricted by circumstance, individuals can, when the conditions are right, make a great difference to whether societies beat their baggage or become its prisoner.
Nelson Mandela did not have to realise that a compromise with the machine that denied the majority their humanity was possible he could, like some Latin American rebels, have insisted on a futile fight to the finish. Nor did FW de Klerk have to realise that the writing was on the wall for white supremacy Ian Smith still has not grasped this. Both had to work with the history that presented itself to them. Their importance lay in their ability to recognise the possibilities for a difference in direction and to act on them.
Leadership takes us forward to more productive directions, squeezes the most progress possible from a given reality. This requires vision to see beyond the immediate and an understanding that real power is the ability to persuade others to work with you to realise common potential, not the capacity to control.
The current behaviour of our political leaders illustrates its lack.
First, the president and those around him seem even more preoccupied than usual with the attempt to impose obedience to the African National Congress leadership. This is not new. But it has taken a deeply disturbing turn, as the police are seemingly drawn into a feud in the governing party. (Minister of Safety and Security Steve Tshwete presumably knows how ominous this sounds, hence his insistence that police are acting out of legitimate concern for the president’s safety. But he has so far failed to produce evidence to allay apprehensions that the police are being inspanned to protect office holders from democratic challenge within the ANC.)
Whether there is a challenge to the president’s leadership is unclear. If there is it may be worth pondering how much of it stems from an approach by ANC leaders that sees internal difference as a threat to be controlled, not an opportunity to be channelled into new dynamism. And leaders who face a challenge of this sort often see it as an opportunity to show that they enjoy more support than their opponents, not a danger to be crushed.
The current problem, therefore, is a tendency to mistake opportunities for threats. And because our actions often take on a logic of their own, it may well be that concern with the short term and with control may lead as surely to the temptation to coerce opposition into silence as openness to the longer term and to inclusion leads to creative energy.
Leadership in the ANC today means what Nehru’s in the Indian Congress meant 50 years ago: the ability to make opponents within the movement feel they are free to express themselves within it. Similarly, leadership of the majority in our society entails an ability to accommodate the minority as our greatest leader, Mandela, recognised and as one of our intellectual leaders, Mamphele Ramphela, pointed out this week.
Second, the leader of the opposition recently felt moved to complain that racist motives are imputed to any incident in which a white is the perpetrator and a black the victim. He was talking of the Northern Province case in which white rugby players are accused of murdering a black man. Despite the claims of Tony Leon’s spin doctors that he was warning against prejudging issues, liberals are meant to say that accused are innocent until proven guilty, not that it’s unreasonable to suggest that a bunch of whites who beat up a black man may have racial motives.
Again, this is no isolated incident. Leon and the Democratic Alliance repeatedly reinforce the fears and antipathies of their white, coloured and Indian constituents rather than seeking ways to build alliances across the divide or to show that the liberalism the Democratic Party still formally champions need not be a code for the privileged to hold on to what they have. Effective leadership would point in another direction. But as long as the DA remains mired in the narrow and immediate, the road to defending white excesses is hard to avoid.
Third, the Pan Africanist Congress’s bizarre arms deal performance is a symptom of a deeper lack of leadership. After the 1994 election, it realised that the Africanism of the 1960s had few takers among today’s voters, most of whom saw the PAC as a bunch of wild-eyed Utopians. So it looked to broaden its appeal by jettisoning some of its baggage.
Leadership would have given us a brand of Africanism that offers a real alternative to the ANC’s stress on the economic and technical by stressing the need for black self-esteem and the application of traditional African values to modern problems. Instead, we have been given an attempt to capitalise on concerns about crime and corruption by threatening felons with amputation and making unsupported allegations against ANC high-ups. Desire for short-term advantage leads almost inevitably to public self-caricature.
In all of these cases political leaders are not necessarily prisoners of history. They have alternatives that, ironically, they or others in their party have publicly embraced. But they have not proved big enough to act on this recognition that there is another way.
President Thabo Mbeki encouraged criticism and dissent at least year’s racism conference. The DA’s Marthinus van Schalkwyk visited Cradock to express his regret at the 1980s police murder of four activists. The PAC’s Ngila Muendane runs programmes to instil in black youth a sense of self worth.
So to insist that those who hold leadership positions become leaders is not ignoring history, nor is it asking them to turn their back on those they represent. It is to note that each can pursue their immediate interests or look beyond their noses to their future. They can remain in their comfortable laagers or take risks by reaching out beyond them. They can try to control those who are different or find ways of working with them.
Right now we are not getting the leadership we deserve. Only when we start getting it will our leaders be remembered kindly, and our society reach its potential.