In a stirring tribute to former African National Congress president Oliver Tambo, ANC elder statesman Kader Asmal has delivered what reads as a veiled criticism of the leadership styles of both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma.
Asmal, a senior ANC MP and national executive committee member, does not specifically name either man in his address, given at the launch of the book, Oliver Tambo Remembered, in Johannesburg.
However, he makes it clear that he regards Tambo’s qualities as exemplary and that, in the run-up to its Polokwane conference, he believes the party’s current leaders are falling short of the standard Tambo set.
”Succession is a crucial step in the [ANC’s] historic journey and we would do well to pause at OR’s life and to imbue its lessons in leadership as a guide to the future,” he writes. ”His ethos as a leader and how he related to others is a fundamental and poignant aspect we should pause to consider during the current period.”
Referring to the deep rifts that have opened in the ANC, Asmal says: ”[Tambo’s] career invoked pride and a strong sense of belonging, a cameraderie in struggle, which few other movements could match, and which we now seem to have lost.”
Asmal signalled his distaste for both frontrunners for the ANC presidency at a meeting of his Rondebosch, Cape Town, branch last week, where he nominated businessman Cyril Ramaphosa for the top job. The nomination was carried and he later said he hoped ”a thousand other ANC branches” would follow suit.
In his speech Asmal pays tribute to South Africa’s political achievements since 1994, notably its constitutional order. Tambo’s insistence on not drafting a constitution in exile was an ”epochal” contribution to this.
He emphasises that Tambo supported the democratic principle of the separation of powers — a major advance for the liberation movement — realising that ”the usurpation of power by one sphere of government which belongs to another would be the surest road to tyranny”.
He makes much of Tambo’s humility, pointing out that in deference to the jailed Nelson Mandela he had described himself as the ANC’s acting president for nearly a decade.
He also underscores the former president’s accessibility; trust in his colleagues, which evoked respect, even love; and nurturing attitude to young talent, however ”tough and difficult”.
Paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling’s If, he says: ”So he could walk with the captains and kings of the world, and never lose the common touch … it was not his style to be protected by a phalanx of private secretaries or a guard of overweight minders.”
Much of this reads as veiled comment on Mbeki’s leadership style, which has been widely faulted as remote, imperious, insecure and centralising.
But in an apparent thrust at Zuma and his strident support base, he also praises Tambo’s ”refusal to resort to populism” and to his rational debating style, free from ”histrionics and tub-thumping”, whose aim was always to build individuals, the ANC and its cause.
He says that, at a time when the ANC is looking to its future and the future leadership of the party and South Africa, ”we must recall … the articulate manner in which OR crafted the language of debate; the absence of fiery, irrational, emotional rhetoric. It often saddens me to see how far from this we have moved in our current struggle for posts which we elevate to so-called succession, where it sometimes seems as if individuals, the movement and its continued historic cause and calling seem to be fair game on the altar of personal ambition.”
Asmal also lays heavy emphasis on Tambo’s non-racialism — a largely forgotten concept in contemporary South African political discourse — citing the former ANC president’s words: ”It is our responsibility to break down barriers of division and create a country where there will be neither blacks nor whites, just South Africans, free and united in diversity.”
Praising Tambo’s determination to fulfil the Freedom Charter’s vision of South Africa, he calls on the ANC to ”grasp the moment of these troubling times” by remaining focused on building tolerance and non-racialism, combating poverty and speaking up for ”the inarticulate, the alienated and the impoverished”.