There are a thousand definitions of what leadership is but, whatever the details, you can be fairly sure of one thing: they all arrive at the conclusion that a leader leads.
The two most important leaders in SA today, at least in terms of electoral support, are President Cyril Ramaphosa and DA leader Mmusi Maimane. But leaders they are not. They are best described as followers. And here is why.
The two share much in common. First and foremost, they both tends towards compromise and process in determining direction.
Ramaphosa is a majoritarian at heart and, to determine where he is going, he outsources decision-making to consensus-seeking mechanisms. As he has now done with almost every pressing issue he faces, establishing commissions and summits, committees and panels, he attempts to lead from behind. Once they have arrived at a view, and the majority has prevailed, he endorses that decision as the way forward.
A wholesale reliance on process reduces you to no more than a political nebbish — a vague facilitator for opinion rather than a person who shapes and directs it
Maimane operates in much the same fashion. Without the largesse state control provides, to set up commissions and committees, he relies almost entirely on the party’s internal decision-making structures to provide direction: the federal council, federal executive and national management committee. Supplementing this is a heavy reliance on internal polling to steer his communication, political programme and the positions he takes.
Both things apply to both leaders, too: Maimane can often be sucked into the world of parliamentary procedure; Ramaphosa is often subsumed entirely by the sentiment that holds in internal party structures. It is a relative difference, but both are generally subservient to process.
Now, to be clear, these things are important. This is not some binary choice between personal conviction and collective wisdom. A good leader can bind people into a decision through consensus-seeking and, likewise, can be wrong too — so it is wise to seek out a broad spectrum of opinion, to weigh its veracity and merit, and then to proceed. Likewise, internal party structures are just as important to maintaining cohesion and coherence. Polling, too, is capable of providing valuable guidance on how best to shape a given message.
It is a matter of degrees. You need both. But a wholesale reliance on process reduces you to no more than a political nebbish — a vague facilitator for opinion rather than a person who shapes and directs it.
Leadership’s vision
Any political leader is elected on the back of their vision, and that is their mandate. Their job, then, is to bring people along with them, as they try to give life to it. How effectively they do that, how well they are able to convince others, is the mark of how compelling they are. But the vision should determined and guide action, not vice versa.
Naturally, one’s personal convictions play a role in this. If you believe in nothing distinctive — and both Ramaphosa and Maimane present themselves as essentially bland constitutionalists or “democrats”, with no particular ideological worldview — then you have no philosophical frame of reference to define and interpret current affairs. Everything can conveniently be outsourced to the constitution. You don’t have to stand for anything, because you stand for everything.
Ramaphosa and Maimane [have] a clear set of personal convictions that set them apart, the bravery to try and define debate on their terms and, therefore, an aura of authority
And if the constitution doesn’t meet popular demand, or some or other majoritarian view — on say, the death penalty or land reform — then one can just amend it, so that it complies with popular opinion. Thus, principles and ideals are often held hostage to more demagogic impulses.
The point is best made by comparing Ramaphosa and Maimane to EFF and COPEleaders Julius Malema and Mosiuoa Lekota respectively. Like them or loathe them, they have all the attributes Ramaphosa and Maimane lack: a clear set of personal convictions that set them apart, the bravery to try and define debate on their terms and, therefore, an aura of authority, clarity of purpose and determination that has allowed the two to stand apart. They lead, they do not follow.
The combination, in an environment defined by a leadership vacuum on all the biggest issues, of which the economy is pre-eminent, has been devastating and seen them set the agenda. Often, they do this in a divisive fashion — in the case of Malema, profoundly so. One could argue he, more than Lekota, represents the other extreme. But that is the price you pay for having an opinion and believing in something. People respond to conviction and clarity and so it is little wonder the EFF appears recently to have eaten into the ANC’s support at the expense of both the ANC and the DA.
Both have used land reform and expropriation without compensation to define themselves and Lekota, in particular, has been very clever in the way he has gone about it. He could tell there was a leadership vacuum on the subject — that both Ramaphosa and Maimane had fudged or hedged their responses to one degree or another — and that, as a result, there was no compelling counter-narrative to the EFF’s socialist fundamentalism. He has stepped into the breach and dominated the alternative view.
EFF: brilliant on land reform
Many will argue Lekota has over-extended himself in this regard, showing too little sympathy for ideas such as redress and restitution. But, politically, that is not the point. The EFF has brilliantly utilised land reform as a wedge issue. It has turned it into an absolute binary choice, simple and easy to understand: either you want all land to be owned by the state, and therefore you support the EFF, or you believe in private property rights, and you don’t.
So effective has he been, say the name Julius Malema and instantaneously the EFF’s position on land reform accompanies whatever other connotations define his personal brand. Political marketing does not come better than that. But say the name Cyril Ramaphosa or Mmusi Maimane and, on a wide range of issues, it is hard to say exactly where they stand at all. There is that general, ill-defined sense that the constitution features somewhere in there, but where exactly is difficult to say. They are a grey fog to Malema’s clear blue water.
Lekota has taken the gap. He now owns the alternative to Malema. Say his name and you know exactly where he stands on the issue: that he fundamentally opposes Malema’s view; that he has a total disdain for any alternative that waivers from or threatens property rights; and that he has no sympathy for the narrative that white South Africans citizens today stole land they currently own.
Ramaphosa, you can almost see him panicking ... he staggers around trying to pretend he is all things to all people but, ultimately, a nothing man.
As a result, he has made mincemeat out of Maimane, who should own this sort of clear conviction-driven, counter-narrative. He needn’t mirror Lekota exactly, he need only demonstrate the same kind of clarity and belief.
But he cannot. Just as Ramaphosa cannot lead the ANC. That sort of decisive ability to influence and direct is simply not in their respective political DNA. They are implementers and facilitators for ideas and policies they did not conceive of and on which they have no distinctive view, outside of whatever zeitgeist defines their party or support.
It is a profound problem for the DA leader in particular. The ANC can at least feign that “collective responsibility” has always been the way the party operates (even if that argument nonsense). But Maimane does not have that excuse. He seems to adopt the position of the last person he spoke to, or the last committee he sat on. Every position or strategy some temporary delight, until he stumbles across the next juicy idea. Rudderless and directionless, he drifts round an ideological sea, occasionally crashing into an island, which he then proudly claims before taking to his boat again.
It is excruciating to watch.
As for Ramaphosa, you can almost see him panicking. Having surrendered himself to the will of the ANC — these days, as Thabo Mbeki recently pointed out, a racial, demagogic seething mass of prejudice and inanity — he spends all his time desperately trying to plant flags and hedge in the lunacy. You can be sure the ANC cares nothing for them. Caught between the will of the party and some socialist nightmare, he staggers around trying to pretend he is all things to all people but, ultimately, a nothing man.
Think of all the strong leaders SA has had: Nelson Mandela, Mbeki, Tony Leon, Helen Zille, all of them led their parties. In the case of Mbeki, with an iron fist. They shaped and directed it, intellectually and ideologically. You knew what they stood for, even if you disagreed with it. But, for SA’s two biggest parties, that age is dead now. It is today the age of the ghost leader, who exists more in spirit than in the real world, of the facilitator and the compromiser, and Jacob Zuma has delivered this epoch to us.
It was Zuma who destroyed the idea of the strong leader. Sure, Mbeki had his faults, his particular brand of autocratic control was by no means best practice, but he had respect for so many norms and standards we took for granted. Things Zuma decimated. In his wake, a bubbling froth of corruption and populism, the only set of beliefs that remained were self-interest and self-preservation.
Little wonder then, that the likes of Ramaphosa and Maimane were so welcomed, and wildly embraced. Both branded as great anti-corruption warriors, constitutionalists and democrats, these were the attributes so many were starved of. They are, however, not enough to be a leader. Any politician should boast those traits. They are base level requirements for public office. To lead you need far more than that. You need a vision. You need to be able to define it. And you need to be able to convince people inside and outside your party of it.
Today in SA, both the governing party and the official opposition are leaderless. Instead, two parties, internally divided and uncertain of who or what they are, are battling with each other on a piecemeal basis. The parties are in charge, but a source of clarity and coherence they are not. Both are without a leader who works like a metonym for what they stand for. And so, their voters and potential voters are no more certain themselves.
And that is the way it will stay. Malema has no competition for leadership at the top of the South African political league table. Simply because he is the only actual political leader.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and government at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
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