The Arrogance of Power. Xolela Mangcu
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XOLELA MANGCU
THE ARROGANCE OF POWER
South Africa’s Leadership Meltdown
TAFELBERG
To the memory of my late grandmother Rose Noteya Nodress ‘Antinti’ Tyamzashe (1886–1981) and my late aunt Nomvula Mangcu Tyamzashe (1923–1986) for opening my eyes to the world.
Introduction
‘Choose your president carefully, because at the end of the day no one can save him from himself.’– Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (1991)
South Africa does not have a tradition of presidential histories. As a result, we have no body of knowledge about the sources and limitations of presidential authority. We know hardly anything about the temperaments of the men who have occupied the highest public office in the land or of what informs their decision-making. We also don’t have a great biographical tradition, although we fare better in this respect than with presidential histories. The reasons for this inattention to presidential scholarship may be deeply rooted in our history. But it may also have to do with the false belief that we elect political parties, not individuals, to govern us. If political parties are our only interest, why bother about individuals? In fact, talking about the individual qualities of our leaders is positively discouraged in our political culture. Yet the political culture of the past 20 years has been significantly shaped by the actions of individual leaders, often with dire consequences. Therein lies the irony: we tell ourselves that individuals do not matter even as our collective attention is focused on their depredations.
The absence of presidential scholarship deprives future presidents of any guides to how they should conduct themselves, or how we should evaluate their performance. Even though the inclusive elections of 1994 gave us the right to govern – and misgovern – ourselves, we remain dependent on politicians’ evaluations of their own performance, and on annual media report cards. Invariably, politicians trot out statistics about electricity connections, roads, houses, clinics and schools, all of which goes under the rubric of ‘service delivery’.
From Thabo Mbeki to Jacob Zuma, the refrain has been that of a ‘better life for all’. Zuma has added a twist to this by proclaiming that ‘we are better off than we were before’. Compared to what? Apartheid? Of course, that was the whole point of the liberation struggle. And who, in their right mind, could be against a better life for anybody? But that is hardly the stuff that moves one to action.
With such banalities as a substitute for national purpose, it is difficult to argue against success, especially when you mark your own script as the ruling party. But I also remember reading from Julius Nyerere, one of our continent’s greatest leaders, that government services are not the be-all and end-all of development, but only its means: ‘People cannot be developed; they can only develop themselves,’ he wrote in Freedom and Development (1974). ‘For, while it is possible for an outsider to build a man’s house, an outsider cannot give the man pride and self-confidence in himself as a human being. Those things a man has to create in himself by his own actions.’
It is this sense of self-reliant development that gives people a sense of dignity, or what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls ‘self-defining freedom’. Steve Biko described this conception of freedom as follows: ‘Freedom is the ability to define oneself according to one’s possibilities, held back not by law but by God and natural surroundings.’ He went on to implement this vision through the programmes of self-reliant development formulated for the black consciousness movement.
Contrary to this vision of Nyerere and Biko – and of Immanuel Kant, who believed we are made human not by satisfying our desires but by attaining human dignity – black people remain a dependent class in South Africa. Those who do not find jobs in the formal economy are warehoused by their millions in the social grants system, deprived of the dignity that comes from self-reliant development. This is an unsustainable set of social and economic arrangements, not only for the inequality it produces but also for the social resentment it generates. This, in turn, produces the political instability glibly referred to as ‘service delivery protests’. Protests and strikes go on for months on end without any leaders showing up, because they have become afraid of their people. At the heart of our leadership malaise is the absence of a common national purpose, and a collective failure of imagination.
There was a time when Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance promised to provide an inspirational public philosophy for transforming our society. However, no sooner had its author announced those lofty ideals than he was distracted by controversies that had little to do with the purpose of the liberation struggle, namely to move the ordinary masses of black people towards self-reliant development and self-fulfilling freedom. I have often wondered what we could have achieved in pursuit of that purpose with the energy and resources that were instead expended on controversies about HIV/AIDS, the arms deal, Guptagate, Nkandla, and countless other costly distractions. Those are the opportunity costs of the endless controversies that have dogged our national leadership over the past twenty years.
The media do better in generating discussions of values, but this is indirectly through exposés of the corruption and malfeasance in the corridors of power. I have been fortunate to be part of a group of columnists who have engaged directly with the broader political and moral questions of our time. We’ve been able to do so because we have been removed from the daily grind of news reportage. And moral questions are unavoidable when hundreds of thousands of people die from HIV/AIDS while their government denies the cause of their death, and thus refuses to do anything about it. As columnists, we have had to step back from what the American historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter characterised as ‘the meaning in a situation’ to rather reflect on ‘the meaning of the situation as a whole’.
The columns collected in this volume are drawn from those written over a 15-year period, from just before Thabo Mbeki’s ascent to the presidency in 1999 until just before our fifth inclusive national and provincial elections in May 2014, effectively covering Mbeki’s entire nine-year presidency up to his resignation in 2008, and Jacob Zuma’s since then. In the absence of detailed presidential scholarship, they provide a week-by-week account of how this eventful history unfolded. I hope they will show that the quantitative decline in electoral support for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) from 1994 to 2014 did not happen overnight or without reason; it has been the result of qualitative decline in leadership over time. On a weekly basis, I watched ANC leaders slowly eat away at the high levels of trust they enjoyed among the majority of the population.
While the ANC has received a mandate to govern for another five years, the quantitative decline in its support over time – with its share of the vote dropping from almost 70 per cent under Thabo Mbeki in 2004 to 65 per cent and 62 per cent under Jacob Zuma in 2009 and 2014 respectively – should worry anyone who is concerned about its future. In the 2014 elections, the party had to pull out all the stops to hold on to Gauteng, eventually by a mere 53 per cent. This should worry the party, because Gauteng is not only the country’s economic heartland but also its most populous province, and the most representative of the South African population. The ANC’s support also declined in all the other major metropolitan areas. This should also worry the ANC because, as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has put it, ‘while governments can enact policies that have the effect of depleting social capital, they have great difficulties understanding how to build it again.’
At the heart of this narrative, though, is the conduct of two presidents: Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. It is the closest an outsider can get to a presidential history. Hopefully, those who have been in the bowels of the presidential system in this period will one day emerge to tell us what really happened – without the usual public spin – and how the grievous mistakes made could be avoided in the future. Maybe the leaders themselves will come clean one day. I wouldn’t bet on it, though; there is always the danger of legal action.
In many ways, this book built itself. The narrative structure tells it all – initial promise, followed by inexplicable failures and grave disappointment. It starts with