/ 10 November 2016

The famous will lead us out of crisis

Columns in the historical city of Palmyra
Columns in the historical city of Palmyra

THE FIFTH COLUMN

Everyone says we have a leadership crisis. Not just in South Africa, but all over the world, people are saying: “We have a leadership crisis.” Or they say a crisis “of leadership” or “in leadership” or “around leadership”. The last seems most appropriately circumspect.

It is heartening, then, to find that Discovery Health (and yes, I’m a member) has such luminaries to address South Africa at its leadership summit in Sandton this month (“standard” tickets: R6 350). Luminaries from overseas, nogal.

When you have a crisis within leadership, rather than merely around it (surely leadership is almost axiomatically surrounded by crisis?), advice from famous people may help the leadership to lead. It is confusing when so much of what we hear goes: “Show some leadership – resign!”

Leaders can’t resign, or they wouldn’t be leaders any more. No, they’d have to go around speaking at leadership summits. What someone should be telling them right now is that being a megalomaniac doesn’t automatically make you a leader.

So one has high hopes of the summit’s distinguished guests, and how nice it is that former footballer David Beckham is to join Greek-American media maven Arianna Huffington and Niall Ferguson, the British historian of money and empire.

I pause to mention that “maven” is a word widely used in the United States media, and is not in fact some kind of carnivorous bird. It is said to descend from the Yiddish mevyn, meaning someone who knows stuff.

Secrets our national leadership could learn from Ms Huffington include how to build a media empire out of personality alone, and how to write books without getting sued for plagiarism – a lesson she obviously learned after book six in the mid-1990s, because she has gone on to write another nine with nary a whisper against any of them. She could also give a short talk on How to Discover Your Husband is Bisexual with a Modicum of Grace, though that goes back a while. I don’t know if that applies to anyone in our government’s upper, er, echelons, but the mere fact that they use the word “echelons” makes one suspicious.

And what might Ferguson offer our leadership? His book Empire argued that colonialism wasn’t really so bad, because gross domestic product per capita in colonised countries had risen over the past few centuries. Surely our leaders know that? Karl Marx said it would happen. I suppose they could learn something from another book of Ferguson’s, The Ascent of Money, if they can follow the numbers.

The former footballer I saw recently in a picture wearing a fetching sweater with a brightly coloured pan-ethic pattern labelled “tribal accents”. I think he and his stylist should be warned that we don’t use that kind of language in this country – least of all to the leadership.