“We have displayed a consistent inclination since we assumed management of our affairs to opt for mediocrity and compromise, to pick a third and fourth eleven to play for us.”
South Africa? No. The description by Chinua Achebe was of Nigeria, his homeland, published in the 1983 monograph The Trouble with Nigeria. Yet it is apt for South Africa in 2007.
This is no diatribe against equity and affirmation. It is a diatribe against the cult of mediocrity that we have come to accept from our leaders across the private, public and civil society sectors.
Between 1990 and 1994 we miraculously talked our way out of trouble, negotiated a path through minefields and constructed an imperfect but widely admired democracy.
A set of world-class leaders who thought laterally, fought from a position of principle and compromised tactically was assembled at Kempton Park, where the key political negotiations took place.
The trade unions brimmed with men and women who sculpted a labour law regime that is world-class (though in need of some real-world modification). They were able to think beyond their special interests; they also wrote and debated social and economic policies, many of which were adopted by the post-apartheid government.
The same quality of leadership was evident in our NGOs. Many leaders of that era took jobs in international bodies where they have made global strides for humanitarianism. The pickings in civil society are paper-thin nowadays.
And in the private sector, visionary leaders shaped wage agreements based on performance and productivity.
I wager that if our freedom was in the hands of the present crop of leaders we’d still be bickering at Kempton Park. We have picked “a third and fourth eleven” to play for us, to paraphrase Achebe.
Look at Parliament, where, until recently, the majority party was under the discipline of chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe.
It is sobering to think that the sex pest kicked out of the African National Congress (ANC) is the nephew of Matthew Goniwe, who gave his entire adult life to overthrowing apartheid and died a martyr at the age of 38.
Mbulelo is almost the same age. His political career died after he sexually harassed a young parliamentary aide of the kind his uncle would probably have mentored and empowered.
He did not rise to prominence by helping to make the ANC in Parliament a force to be reckoned with. Instead, he owned businesses he did not declare, used Parliament to shield himself from maintenance suits and tried to force ANC MPs to sign an oath of allegiance to President Thabo Mbeki.
It is an extreme example — but the two men personify the qualities that helped usher in our democracy and the dross that we have now become used to.
There are notable exceptions, but the cream has not risen to the top in the new millennium.
Perhaps freedom has made us fat and complacent. Perhaps we are too much of an “Ag shame” nation, quick to forgive and overlook. Instead of a spur to action, freedom has become a comfort zone for leaders who have largely abrogated policy thinking to technocrats who model “solutions” on laptops. Of course, state management is a science, and a tough one.
Perhaps as the ANC starts its fourth term its elected leaders will become more comfortable and adept at power and display the qualities required to build democracy and foster development.
The affliction of mediocrity is also apparent in party leadership across the spectrum. Helen Zille has potential, but other DA leaders in the wings are still in political diapers.
Ditto the ANC Youth League and Young Communist League, whose deification of Jacob Zuma and anachronistic ideologies hamper the flowering of creative young leadership.
The ANC’s Luthuli House headquarters is mediocrity city, headed by the underwhelming Kgalema Motlanthe and spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, who last year seriously told South Africans there was no battle over the leadership of the ANC.
And what of the trade unions, who have birthed some of South Africa’s best leaders? Last year, Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi threatened that if new charges were brought against Zuma he would take workers on to the streets. Such intellectual paucity and disrespect for democratic institutions is widespread in these crucial movements of the working class.
Many of the world-class political representatives who remain will exit the stage come the election in 2009.
Thabo Mbeki will go — a great politician, though one who has helped usher the country and his party into the culture of the so-so.
Goniwe, it must be remembered, was Mbeki’s choice. So is our team of premiers who, but for Gauteng’s Mbhazima Shilowa, are uniformly unimpressive. Mbeki has not punished mediocrity, as the fortunes of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri illustrate.
In a sea of mediocrity, good leaders come to be viewed as excellent, often making them complacent. Trevor Manuel is a fine finance minister, a clever politician and an orator in several languages, as his annual budget performance shows. But he can also be intolerant, arrogant and plain hardegat — and the adoring plaudits do not encourage him to mend his ways. Likewise, Tito Mboweni is the country’s best-ever central bank governor but a vain and impatient man.
2007 offers us a chance to raise the bar. It’s the year in which the ANC will choose a new president, a moment which could have a domino effect on leadership throughout the country.
There is much at issue. As Achebe argued prophetically more than 20 years ago, “the cult of mediocrity will bring the wheels of modernisation grinding to a halt throughout the land”.