The proverbial methane is inside the movement, Mavuso Msimanga lost the mask to survive.

While the problem of leadership has always been the liberation movement's growing problem from a necessity point of view, it has now taken on the character of an inescapable concern. Through leadership quality, society can have a dialogue with itself about the future. Given that leaders are, and in a materialist doctrine sense, 'products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed leaders are products of other circumstances and upbringing, we tend to forget that leaders of organisations change circumstances and the leadership environment'. The African National Congress has, in the last three decades, been in a complex dialogue with itself about what value system it wants to project itself as representing now that it commands the state power.

In the vortex of policy pronouncements and preoccupation with the deconstruction of the apartheid system, the liberation movement believed in the persuasive potency of its documents, notably the eye of the needle, more than the prowess of the role models it allowed, through deployment, to determine the cadence of its leadership responsibility towards society.  Given that those in leadership will be brought closer to each other because of their mutual respect, which flows from sharing in the confraternity of power, it has not been easy to thread a philosophy of leadership outside the paradigm of problematising authority as a necessary structure to ensure stability and succession. There are leaders that end up in front of others, a context often mistaken to mean that those behind them are following when being in front is what most are clamouring for. 

The resignation of Mavuso Msimanga, and potentially others that did not go public, given the warning of the ANC SG to stalwarts, carries with it the reputational value that has been manufactured and curated around him. He resigns from the positional advantages of Deputy Chairperson of the MKVA and an influential member of the 101 Veterans of the ANC. These organisations possess the largest concentration of in-ANC person-days experience, which creates a critical bridge of in-ANC generations that only written accounts can attempt to complete. While his resignation will uproot him from the institutional edifice the ANC afforded him with power to influence, the societal positions he occupies in the memory of society will determine the new reach of his value to South Africa. 

Basic political theory teaches that individuals are components of interests. They are embodiments of the diversities in society upon which politics are generally based. Their sovereign character as individuals makes them not simply puppets of interests but can operate as nodes of sponsored blocks of interests. With accumulated social, political, and economic capital, they can quickly become the substrates of interests and thus affect the course of politics by their opinions or coalitions. 

Individuals often favoured by history will define, structure, or construct a political order with which they will answer the questions 'who rules', 'who should rule', and 'how to be ruled'. Over time, the political elites presiding over the political order, and based on the power and resources they command, have been able to create arrangements with which they would govern society, including themselves. This, they agreed, will be called the government of, by, and for the people; otherwise, it will also be called a democratic order. The political order establishes hierarchies inside a class that rules and a democratic order establishes hierarchies inside a class that governs in terms of defined mandates, also called the Constitution. 

 

These arrangements of hierarchies in society establish axioms of power very few revolutions, if any, have been able to deconstruct as templates of political elite building. Despite the grandiose political rhetoric during revolutions or struggles, the unequal distribution of political power stays constant; the resultant elites are internally homogeneous after a revolution, if not unified and homogeneous. The striking feature of post-liberation elites is their ability to be self-perpetuating and exclusive, albeit essentially autonomous. This explains why almost all political questions are settled according to the interests of the political elite. Mavuso Msimanga was a component of such elites in South Africa.

 

It is only when there is a miscarriage in the construct of a beneficiary political or otherwise elite that the ruling establishment will fund a new revolution to restore the pecking order in society. The pursuit of a position where the probability of influencing the policies and activities of the state or the authoritative allocation of values remains the single potent glue with which political elites are built. This constitutes the main currency of higher-order politics or interests. 

 

However, no interest is safe because interests, if unmatched or unmanaged in a political order, are free to rise and fall. This explains the maxim 'there are no permanent interests in a society with diffused hierarchies'. If individuals become institutions and accumulate capital beyond institutions that house them, they assume importance to politics commensurate to the (perceived) power they embody.

 

In this context, the political or otherwise capital of individuals like Mavuso in a society should be taken seriously. In politics, it should be axiomatic that some people will have power more than others, and often more than those who sit in positions which look like they have the power. The South African Constitution vests authorities in the legislature, the President, and the courts. It then diffuses the power to the people as individuals or coalitions they are organised within. This creates micro-coalitions with which the exercise of the various authorities can be managed, controlled, and directed. At best, society can estimate the contours of power distribution (political and economic) by relying on indirect evidence from the depth of public participation.

 In the parlance of Hlengani Mathebula, 'the resignation is a painful moment for the movement requiring honest reflection. He submits that Mavuso Msimanga is not a "Johnny come late into the movement but a highly decorated leader...entrusted with serious responsibilities."In Mathebula's comment, we read a call for the movement to understand the costs of losing cadres that are capsules required to cure the ongoing leadership degradation. In a period where the possibility of losing political power torments leaders more than focusing on the exigencies of providing leadership, the greatest barrier to sobriety of leadership is often not from outside but those that lead, and Mavuso might be pushed by 'breeds of methane' which smoke out the proverbial rats, even within the movement.  

WA TWA!!