The ANC 55th Conference is getting close, the contest for leading Africa's oldest liberation movement is hotting up, policy rhetoric less defines the future of the liberation promise, the long-awaited final Zondo report is out, and recommendations are with the head of the national executive in whom the executive authority of the state vests, and South Africa is again on tenterhooks with its President and former head of national intelligence in a tension that might compromise confidence in our national security apparatus.
The economy is performing at sub minimal, a condition of national disaster as a result of the punishing drought is in place, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality and surrounding areas are for all practical intents and purposes a water unsecured space, the Ukraine and Russia war has increased our food insecurity by a factor that threatens our food sovereignty, food processing factories are facing closure due to increases in the price of input commodities and global demand induced inflation, and public infrastructure that should be the backbone of any comeback is progressively entering a state of being permanently derelict unless practical intervention decisions are taken.
The unemployment rate has reached runaway stages where it has become more important to protect existing jobs than to create new ones, the creativity of the country's political and private sector leadership is at an all-time low whilst their zeal to survive has increased selfishness and greed as new standard political economy decisions are processed through. What is left of private sector innovation, and thus investment appetite, as a belief in the potential of South Africa's economy is frustratingly choked by a maze of bureaucratic ineptitude disguised as regulations such as EAP approvals, and licensing conditions, and so on?
The rise in reported crime rates, the involvement of police officers in crime syndicates, the ascendance of the criminal underworld in regional politics, the unabated illicit financial flows out of the economy that is reaching disinvestment levels, and the growing brain drain as manifested in the exodus of skilled individuals and an increase of parent funded registration of children in foreign tertiary institutions.
These and many more that read like a horror novel are what unfortunately characterizes South Africa today. Few matters have more profoundly shaped the dinner discussions in South Africa about its future than the growing ineptness of our national political leadership since the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. The almost liquidated moral authority of dominant political movements and parties has not only illuminated the rise of anarchy in less policed spaces but also foregrounded the need for society to push back against arguments that South Africa can recover at the hands of incumbents that are trading with its executive authority. Whilst the country still has what is left of its infrastructure prowess and mineral resources endowments, its advantage of being a leading formal African economy with the most westernized financial services sector, South Africa is in a state where its intangible resources of efficiency culture, national cohesion, ability to use its Oliver Tambo bequeathed person-to-person diplomacy to its advantage, and continuing to draw down from the Mandela dividends is in decline.
Answers to these issues lie in the ability of the country to raise from amongst its citizens men and women that can extricate South Africa out of its quicksand of leadership ineptness. What has to date characterized the nation's choice of leaders has been a focus on those individuals that became situational leaders as a result of pressures on their livelihoods caused by the condition of Apartheid. Most of those that we have entrusted our future into their hands are shaped to be leaders by their bravery to confront apartheid and work at its demise, including deconstruction of its institutions of leadership. Lately, in this mix, we have included those that have characterized leadership in politics as a conduit to participate in government as an economy of spending and in some instances stealing taxpayers' money or tax revenue.
Whilst those that were created by the anti-apartheid struggle to be leaders should be celebrated for their bravery, the time to answer the questions of whether they possess the skills, knowledge, and attributes required to advance an economy as sophisticated as ours need to be honestly answered. When leaders discount their importance and attractiveness to those that vote them into power, the organizations or movements that produce them will pay price with their hard-earned legitimacy. It is the power of the example that leaders and their organizations display, and not the example of the power they perpetually claim that would attract talented leaders into their organizations and what they stand for.
Leadership in South Africa is at a crossroads. We so much believed, and legitimately so, in those that led us in the struggle against apartheid to the extent that we made them the context of all contexts in the leadership of our country. When the world gave Nelson Mandela the Nobel Peace Price, we should have read the script that beyond him we probably needed a breed of leadership that would define and be guided by a new national interest. Revelations of the many investigative commissions and various reports of Chapter 9 institutions should be enough evidence that the caliber of leadership we have or had as a society needs repurposing or complete overhaul including a wholesale change of incumbents or their organizations.
It is this national imperative that we as citizens face which makes this choice one of the greatest balancing act a nation has to take. Our challenge is to stimulate the cultural creativity of the whole nation, and enhance our culture of leadership selection to be a defining feature of how we define and brand our country, and not its political parties and movements. The context of all contexts South African should be what our constitution obligates its citizens and more acutely those that lead it in all sectors. The quality of leaders and leadership demanded by what our Constitution prescribes is what should define our national and cultural confidence as a key additive to what we present to a world that should do business with us as a nation.
If the above means we come up with an amnesty of sorts to pardon those we all agree were accidents of our history and were thus accidentally defined as leadership, let us seriously consider the option, on condition they agree to never stand for public office. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A hi vulavuleni
🤷🏿♂️Let us talk
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