The nature of good leadership, when “leading” has become more a commodity than a passion, is now so overwritten as to render almost any analysis of it hackneyed from first principles.
There are all the standard component parts — conviction, vision, purpose, advice, compromise, and so on — each one the soil from which a thousand corporate breakaway sessions or strategic courses have grown. Google “leadership” and a myriad easy-to-follow checklists will populate your screen, each element of which you can “aspire” to, “learn from” and “personally develop”.
Leadership is a business, and there is no shortage of experts who can sell it to you as a package. We are in a golden age of leadership, the advertisements would have you believe. Every middle manager is inevitably on the path to corporate glory and wealth.
Makes you wonder, amid all this brilliance, why it is when it comes to politics, private-sector business is generally so utterly supine and cowardly.
That said, public leadership is on an altogether lower level. It can’t even cobble together an illusion. It’s a wasteland. You can take those corporate checklists and apply them as a template. You’ll be lucky to tick a box or two.
Why is that? Why do we produce so few political leaders of any real stature?
Naturally, one looks to the ANC first. It’s a dead end. The party actively discourages individuality. It is a collective. It’s leaders are no more than a spokesperson for some amorphous zeitgeist no-one can actually pin down. Stick your head out too far in that party — actually try to lead — and it will be cut off and served to you on a platter.
The DA, in the other direction, has become totally subservient to the idea of the grand leader. The leader is the party, his or her personality a moral litmus test for everything about the DA, and everyone in it. Every policy, every position, every cough or sneeze a metaphor for the DA in its entirety. And the media have played no small part in making sure the party’s reputation lives or dies by whatever the leader had for breakfast.
And so it has produced a range of archetypal, one-dimensional, vague vessels for whatever general sentiment it seeks to embody. Moulded from that sentiment and held hostage by it, its leaders can offer up only platitudes and vagaries that, the party believes, best reflect consensus.
The EFF has a leader. Julius Malema stands apart as a man of conviction, vision and purpose. He is also wildly authoritarian and hypocritical. His political philosophy is dangerous and demagogic. He is a leader in the worst sense of the word; everything that makes him effective tends towards autocracy.
And so, the EFF has no real leadership cohort aside from him, just sycophants who mirror his populism to the extent he has been forced, literally, to tell his followers not to bow down and worship him.
But all of the big three parties do have two things in common. First, a dearth of new leaders. There is the odd individual who has promise, but they are the exception, not the rule. For the most part, these parties — each of which boast a hundred different internal leadership platforms — have little to show in the way of future leadership in any quantitative sense.
They will all deny this of course. The future has never been brighter they say. But then, you are forced to ask where all this young talent is. The ANC is an old-age home for failure, the DA has been forced to turn back to a generation it had supposedly moved past and the EFF is effectively a four-man show that would cease to exist if its leader retired.
The second is a lack of conviction. Cyril Ramaphosa is essentially a mediator, not a leader. John Steenhuisen seems only to be able to define himself by what he is not, rather than what he is. Julius Malema has conviction coming out of his ears. Only, his convictions change every five minutes so you never really know where he stands on anything with any real certainty.
The ANC’s lack of conviction, you would think, an opportunity for the DA. But it is defeated and confused at the moment. Every position is debated, its members in government operate like they are in a silo — totally disinterested in the party and never willing to invest any personal capital in the battle of political ideas, and it is so addicted to social media, it seems to spend most of its time and energy arguing about tweets.
You really feel if the DA was just able to agree on, and unite behind, say, three simple messages, that alone would revolutionise the way it is perceived. You feel the chances of that are small. It doesn’t just lack the ability to agree but the will and discipline to unite.
As for the ANC, former president Thabo Mbeki really did a number on that party. He had some conviction, whatever you make of it. The nuclear reaction to that was the age of Jacob Zuma, with it a kind of bottom-up populism and division that even he couldn’t control in the end. It resulted in the irony that was “the man of the people” being accused of acting like a force unto himself in his dying days.
Ramaphosa, by nature hyper-allergic to anything that might resemble conviction, has inherited all this unhappiness. His response, to manage SA by committee, has produced a consensus — unfortunately, that consensus seems increasingly to be that things are not working, and thus there are ever-louder calls for “tough decisions” to be made. Good luck with that.
Is it really so hard for the ANC or the DA to just say, “We stand for this. This means these three clear, unambiguous priorities”? Clearly it is. So instead everyone is for everything: “fighting poverty”, “fixing education”, “reducing unemployment”, etc. Maybe we should just have one political party? “The Everything Alliance”.
You wonder who will be running SA in 10 years time? Can you identify what an ANC cabinet would look like in 10 years? Can you say what the DA leadership will look like in 10 years? At least we know Julius Malema will still be running the EFF. Guess that is something.
And even if you could identify much of that future, what would these people stand for? BEE? Some version of the NHI no one can quite grasp? How big would the public-sector wage bill be? Who knows. No-one really seems to be able to agree as things stand.
Malema has the radical left on lockdown. Remember the Young Communist Party, supposedly the vanguard for socialism? The EFF has decimated it. Does it even exist any more? It has done away with the ANC Youth League too. That is what conviction will do for you. But all that is the shallow end of electoral pool. The vast majority of voters occupy a different terrain, maybe not the centre but certainly not the Soviet Union of 1940. And all they have is ambiguity.
If the ANC or the DA is able to produce a leader of real conviction in the near future, they are going to have field day. But to do that, they need to unlearn a whole lot of things that now seem ingrained into mainstream politics. They are going to have to learn to lead. Amazing that in just 25 years, we have already forgotten what that is.
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