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MORTALITY’s STRONG HAND IS LOOSENED: TRIBUTE TO Prof Zweli Mphehle

    The debt of humanity to nature seems to be only payable through death. How nature comes back to us and makes a demand for our exit from its eternal peace, is what humanity has been unable to predict and control. We are thus all in a natural space that has many dates with us; these are the date to be born...up to the date to depart. In the interceding period we have so many other dates to have various encounters with fellow men and fellow citizens of nature.

One of the dates that Zweli Mphehle had was one that I remembered the day he or I knew him. I met him as a neighbor in Doornpoort, where we both lived until I left him there. I then met him as a fellow parent at a crèche where our children were in the same age cohort. These dates were to be further expanded in our professional lives when we met as active members of the South African Association of Public Administration and Management. It is this SAAPAM date within which I had a better revelation of the mortal Zweli and the immortal Professor and President of SAAPAM.

Priestly a human he was, priestly a leader he became. As we went through ructions in our association, he controlled many an emotion of those that were wrestling the ideational control and destiny of the Public Administration discipline. As he mastered the grief of being undermined as equals in the ideation space, he pastored our approaches in a priestly way. To this effect, he rose to being a President of SAAPAM. It was during his term that we saw stability in the association, we saw the coming together of the discipline community in ways we least imagined.

As President he presided over the posthumous recognition of Dr Zola Skweyiya and the of the living Professor Sangweni. In awarding these icons of and in the discipline, he will be remembered to have said ‘in them we saw ourselves and in them we are making ourselves immortals of the discipline in South Africa’. As his star was rising, he would later be recognized with the responsibility of holding fort as Head of the TUT Public Affairs Department, a position he held with no reported dysfunction thus far.

In Charles Dickens parlance, Zweli Mphehle is was to the discipline a better person that we believe will indeed also be a lovely corpse. The universal truthfulness of death has once again robbed us of a great soul. As he closes his eyes in a manner that give comfort to the apparel of the dead, we are reminded of a Shakespearean line that "to weep is to make less the depth of grief”...and that with all our intelligence and might... "we cannot hold mortality's strong hand."

Goodbye our knight, your armor remains with us, we shall wear it for your legacy’s sake. Rest In Peace Professor Zweli Mphehle.

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