“We want to have leaders who don’t make us want to bow our heads. We don’t want leaders who make you want to hide your head, feeling ashamed.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The Arch’s words resonate this week. They come on the back of the fiasco that was the countrywide “charm offensive” by African National Congress (ANC) presidential candidate Jacob Zuma.
Zuma knows that key audiences view him with deep scepticism, so he tried to wow them. It hasn’t worked. What is the point of a charm offensive if it does anything but charm?
For two months Zuma has addressed the business world, Afrikaners, the Jewish community and farmers, as well as granting interviews to the international media, in an attempt to articulate what he stands for.
Other ANC leaders must be appalled by his repeated bouts of foot-in-mouth disease.
This week Zuma was forced to release a statement clarifying what he really meant by saying this or that. How embarrassing!
Emerging from all the interviews and the public addresses has been a picture of a leader who has no core principles and who says what he thinks his audience wants to hear. In other words, an ambitious populist.
He has, in effect, questioned a Constitutional Court ruling on the death penalty, preaching a vindictive gospel that is closer to “an eye for an eye” than the rights-based criminal justice system our Constitution upholds.
He has complained that criminals are given more respect than they deserve and that the laws need to “bite”. Ironically, he has spent many months and millions of rands of taxpayers’ money trying to ensure that the law does not bite him.
He told the Financial Mail that South Africa should consider a dual labour system and then promptly somersaulted when he met the Congress of South African Trade Unions’s leaders, saying he would lay down his life for the workers.
“Uninspiring”, “vague” and “not very clever” were some of the phrases used to describe his performance at a forum on South Africa’s future hosted by Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein last week.
In a typical diversionary tactic, the ANC has accused the media of a concerted attempt to misrepresent its president. Perhaps the party’s other leaders should go and listen to him and gauge the audience reactions for themselves.
To top it all, the Financial Times strongly suggested this week that Zuma may have raised his case with Mauritian Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam in a bid to ensure that he gets a smooth ride through that country’s courts. His aim, as in South Africa, is to prevent crucial evidence from being presented at his upcoming fraud trial.
Ramgoolam now claims that Zuma did not ask for his intervention to block evidence being handed over to the National Prosecuting Authority, but that he merely explained the Mauritian legal system to the ANC president. Why would he do such a thing if the request was not at least hinted at? And what does this say about Zuma’s approach to the rule of law?
Of course, the ANC can elect any leader it likes. But it should be thinking hard about whether Zuma is the kind of president South Africa wants. Like the archbishop, we do not want to bow our heads in shame after next year’s election.
A hare-brained scheme
Nationalise the South African football team. Hah! Another hare-brained plan from a sports ministry always short of ideas.
It’s a complete non-starter given the contractual restraints binding all the potential Bafana Bafana players. What is equally crazy about Sports and Recreation Minister Makhenkesi Stofile’s “plan” is the underlying view of South Africa as a footballing powerhouse.
To correct such misconceptions, he only needs to check the Fifa rankings, which have us perched at 71st — between Uzbekistan and Costa Rica. Our neighbours, Zimbabwe, who this week kindly scored a goal for us in a 2-1 win, are not too far behind, at 94th.
We certainly have plenty of real worries about the 2010 World Cup. Some of the stadiums pencilled in as possible venues are behind schedule and are emerging as opportunities for the lining of pockets by a range of crooked individuals.
The local organising committee (LOC) is not exactly advertising itself as an employer of choice. Amid loud whispers of general unhappiness, it has lost its public face, Tumi Makgabo. The ball-busting between LOC chairperson Irvin Khoza and CEO Danny Jordaan is legendary and destructive.
We should start thinking of the World Cup as a long and complicated party we are going to have to host rather than an outlet for jingoistic fantasies. Instead of creating unrealistic expectations, Stofile should be urging South Africans to get stuck in and deal with the real catering issues.
Of course, the two-year isolation Stofile recommends as a way of ensuring a South African victory in the World Cup could have applications in other areas. We can think of one or two national leaders (who may or may not have presidential ambitions and be facing criminal proceedings) who could profitably be removed from the public arena.