Leadership is the art of being followed and revered for what your last performance was about. When society invokes your past to impose it to your present, there is something about your present that does not inspire confidence to face a future with you as a leader. Capturing the imagination of society on what matters to it at the time you should ascend is a sure way of galvanising support from quarters you never imagined. This task has grown to become a science and has practitioners and professionals that specialise in converting torment into advantage.
Generally leaders, especially political ones, tend to dogmatically stick to what worked when they rose to leadership positions they occupy. The truth is that leadership is a function of networks and networking, unless those that were with you when you rose mutate into nodes of new network expansions, they can easily become targets of other networks to capture the new leader's influence. Remember, it takes a network to dislodge another, even within the same organisation. Change of roles and contexts is extraordinarily difficult, and most attempts to initiate and sustain it fail or disintegrate: and often not innocently.
The trick is to unlock those individuals through which change to the new context of leadership may depend upon. This starts and ends with the recalibration of the mental maps yourself and your network carry in your heads about the new influence or power. How your historical network see your leader and the new life world he operates in will go a long way to anchor the historical network into his future. For a network to stay relevant to a leader, it must confront all inside the network with key contrasts between the past, present and future versions of the world as they know it. This requires sophistication beyond social clubbing.
The wave of taking on ANC Deputy President Paul Mashatile has taken the dimension of targeting his network of friends, family, and comrades. It is an exercise to manufacture a narrative of suspicious by association. A public lynching without the Deputy President as the central feature. The absence of 'dirt' in the DP has turned the model of 'corruption' to consolidate a manufactured consent about ANC leadership generally.
With South Africa facing an election with most of the population being an undecided unit of voters, seasoned propagandists will target these voters to either sway their votes against one leader or another or keep them undecided through confusion and misinformation. The South African propaganda machine has built corruption and state capture as the standard to which leaders will be judged against. This standard has reached levels of ideology to the extent that none of the media platforms are interrogating leaders on what they stand for either than how potentially corrupt or capturable they are, and if captured by 'approved' capturers they are good leaders.
South Africa has yet to know what the new candidates vying for its highest office are about. Our Constitution, as a conglomeration of the various ideological persuasions in the country, provides the most neutral content to interrogate the new leaders about its implementation. If we accept that South Africa has a troubled past, that past might be tormenting to some, especially the social or otherwise circles they commanded.
A plan to extricate South African leaders from public lynching target positions is now overdue. We must interrogate the vectors of analysis those leading the charge are operating from. The race-class lenses that have been deployed on leaders and their organisations must be called out for what they are. It must be the substance of the person or subject of propaganda that is at issue.
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