The Arrogance of Power. Xolela Mangcu
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the G-8, the Commonwealth or the World Economic Forum. He has almost singlehandedly placed the idea of the African Renaissance at the centre of global policy discussions.
As South Africans, we should be thankful for the manner in which he has shepherded our country back into the community of nations, establishing important bilateral relations with powerful nations such as the United States, Britain, and China. His experience as head of the ANC’s international mission in exile helped hone the grace, comfort, skills and talent he shows at these forums. However, the opposite is true of the president’s performance on the domestic front, where he has acted more like a manager concerned with strategic problem-solving. Here, he has followed a frenetic pace of institution-building, administrative reform, and legislative enactments.
While the president has shown bold leadership in respect of racial transformation, he has been more guarded on the economic front. Given that there is greater consensus on the need for racial redress than there is around economic policy, the managerial strategist in him knows which fight not to pick. The managerial mystique extends beyond economic policy to domestic policy in general. There is a widely held perception that the president is a stickler for detail. Cabinet ministers are like managers directly accountable to the chief executive. As it happens in many organisations, daily transactional leadership has been substituted for long-term visionary and inspirational leadership around issues of values. This is what James MacGregor Burns would call ‘transformational leadership’. The privileging of strategic details gains a momentum of its own, and detracts from the development of an overarching leitmotif for the country. Loyalty, survival, and ‘not rocking the boat’– the hallmarks of managerialism – take precedence over risk-taking, experimentation and innovation – the hallmarks of leadership.
And so, here we are with a president whose leadership potential, at least on the domestic front, remains half-fulfilled: a global leader of the African Renaissance shrouded in managerial mystique at home, a leader of racial transformation held back by the strategic managerialism of economic and domestic policy.
Plot debacle suggests opposition is the new treason
Sunday Independent, 29 April 2001
I was at a private dinner with former United States president Bill Clinton in Johannesburg the other day when my cellphone rang. What a rude intrusion, I thought, as I fumbled for the phone. It was one of my friends. ‘Hey man, turn on the TV! The minister of safety and security, Steve Tshwete, is alleging that Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa have been spreading rumours that Thabo Mbeki was involved in the murder of Chris Hani!’
Here we go again, I thought. Our politics have become an embarrassment, a joke and a farce. Our political leaders have given official sanction to the insidious and deadly politics of rumour-mongering. One of the dinner guests asked: ‘What if the movement hotheads just decide to go and shoot the alleged plotters?’ After all, we come from a history of blind loyalty during the anti-apartheid struggle in which the slightest disagreement could lead to instant death. All that was needed to eliminate a political enemy was for someone to shout ‘impimpi!’ (informer). And how long would it take before we all got caught up in ever-widening intrigues about who’s plotting against whom? Are we really becoming just another banana republic in which power is wielded through political intrigue? What price political power?
I believe the answers to these questions will be revealed in how the public responds to Tshwete’s allegations. Let me begin with the scarier response. The day after the minister’s remarks, I got into my car and drove to my home town of Ginsberg in Eastern Cape. As soon as I arrived, I stopped off at one of my favourite watering holes, and found tongues wagging. One guy said: ‘Kungaqhuma kubasiwe (there is no smoke without fire); the minister would not have said it if it wasn’t true. Those three guys are ambitious.’ Another one chimed in: ‘Thabo must now get the support of the Xhosa people.’ And then a conspiratorial masterpiece that could have come out of a John le Carré novel: ‘You see, Cyril, Tokyo and Mathews were involved in the arms deal, and Thabo wanted to expose them. That is why they want to remove him.’ All this would be comical if it wasn’t so dangerous.
By contrast, Nelson Mandela has shown us the way to respond to this politics of innuendo. Ever the honourable statesman, he spoke for many people when he came out in defence of the integrity of the three alleged ‘plotters’. I suppose he was demonstrating, as only he knows how, that democratic leadership is first and foremost about building trust, and not about sowing suspicion and division.
The political economist Albert Hirschman once drew a distinction between social capital such as trust and financial capital such as money. Whereas money decreases with frequent use, trust accumulates through frequent use. The question then is whether Mbeki and his party have done enough to build the social trust necessary for citizens to compete openly for political office without fear of being labelled plotters. Mbeki and the ANC must face the challenge that democratically elected leaders face all around the world: they must either shape up or ship out. And we must get to a point where that is a ready sanction for our leaders. Challenges to leadership should be viewed as democratic contestation instead of ‘plots’.
Countdown to the politics of adaptation has begun
Sunday Independent, 6 May 2001
The other night, I watched the ANC MP Mnyamezeli Booi on television congratulating the minister of safety and security, Steve Tshwete, on a job well done. I have known ‘Nyamie’ since our days in the student movement in the mid-1980s. His loyalty to the ANC was unshakeable, and by the looks of things it still is. My incredulity at his song of praise for the minister was therefore tempered by my prior understanding of this long-standing loyalty.
For Nyamie, organisational survival supersedes considerations about the external environment to which the organisation must appeal for support. Implicit in the primacy of the organisation over society is a deeply held belief in the indispensability of the ANC. As if attesting to this, Tshwete treated parliament as nothing more than a temporary inconvenience, declaring: ‘I have to fly to Pretoria now.’
He could do this because he has the backing of the party bosses in parliament. But, contrary to the leadership’s expectations, the insistence on unity has often led to party fragmentation as voters compete over interests. As the sociologist Alvin Gouldner cautioned, ‘organisational survival is possible only in icy stasis in which security, continuity, and stability are the key terms’. Needless to say, the ANC members of the portfolio committee on safety and security chose to err on the side of ‘icy stasis’ and let him off the hook.
I welcome the attempts by the head of the ANC presidency, Smuts Ngonyama, to own up to the damage that the minister’s statements have done to the country. But the instinct for organisational face-saving kept showing through his retractions, which sometimes sounded like ‘non-retraction retractions’. I mean, it’s rather ludicrous for the ANC leadership to commit a major blunder such as implicating three senior public figures in a plot to oust the president, and then to turn around and blame the media. It is equally irresponsible to suggest that Tshwete’s comments were a matter of opinion. As for the argument that Tshwete did not have the benefit of hindsight that his critics have, may I simply suggest that we elect leaders precisely because they presumably exercise the political judgment needed to avert political disasters?
I have deliberately juxtaposed Nyamie’s and Smuts’s responses to suggest a choice for the president, the person where the buck ultimately stops. The choice is between the politics of organisational survival which has inevitably culminated in the current politics of intrigue on the one hand, and a politics of adaptation in which the party leadership goes beyond its narrow organisational concerns to address those of the broader society on the other. I submit that the mounting crises in the ruling party and government are intricately bound up with the politics of organisational survival.
And yet, potential crises will only be averted when there is a more open, less defensive organisational culture within the ANC. The question is whether the president will embrace and lead this politics of adaptation, or this will require a new leader. Mbeki has three more years to either dig us further into this