Leading the way

Arguing that good political leadership is central to South Africa's future, William Gumede looks at what the country's most prominent politicians have to offer

The main immediate future challenges for South Africa are maintaining high economic growth rates, cementing a quality constitutional democracy and forging a new inclusive nation following centuries of divisions. As important, the country will have to patch up its fraying social fabric. Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu described South Africa as in “in danger of losing its moral direction” and risking losing its “sense of right and wrong”.

Like most developing countries, all these challenges are deeply interweaved with the kind of leadership at the helm of South Africa incorporated.
Many African and increasingly developing countries do look up to South Africa as a beacon in what is increasingly for developing countries a frighteningly uncertain, dangerous and complex world.

In December 2007, the ruling African National Congress elects its new leader, who will become the leader of the country in 2009, when the next national elections will take place, and which the ANC on current form is most likely to win. The outcome of the ANC’s December 2007 election will have wide-ranging effect on South Africa’s immediate future. With a 5% growth rate, South Africa is finally about to take off. This growth rate could be reversed, maintained, or could torpedo into the range of the East Asian tigers.

Under a lacklustre leader things will at best continue business as usual or backslide. Yet South Africa cannot afford ordinariness. Although President Mbeki must be credited for bringing economic stability and the highest growth rates since the 1970s, the benefits of the economic boom have been desperately unequal – the majority of black poor are still excluded as they were during apartheid, and whites and a small proportion of black political entrepreneurs close to the ANC and the black middle class are doing very well.

South Africa’s terrifying apartheid legacy have meant that the majority of blacks will mostly suffer from high unemployment, poverty and lack of skills – itself a source of future social, political and economic instability. Not much has changed. A mediocre leader will only magnify South Africa’s problems to itself and the rest of the world. But a dynamic leader will bring new energy, confidence and ideas to the ANC and the nation. In South Africa’s great favour is that it has plenty in leadership talent. Yet the question that looms large is whether the collective voice of the country can again allow the extraordinary talent to flower – or whether the best of the ANC’s traditions of internal democracy would be subverted by its worse.

Officially, two candidates lead the race for the leadership: the current incumbent, President Thabo Mbeki, who cannot stand for another term as president of the country because the constitution bars it, but can still lead the ANC; and Jacob Zuma, the former deputy president of the country, who was sacked by Mbeki following allegations of sleaze. Neither of the two men, who are about the same age, are steeped in the exile liberation struggle wing of the ANC, which represents the view that more closed, non-consultative and limited participatory tradition would be good for the country. The idea is for him to leave soon after elected as ANC president, to make way for a successor that will carry on his legacy.

Before he fell out with Mbeki following his sacking, Zuma was the president’s closest ally. Mbeki had appointed him deputy president of South Africa in 1999, even though former President Nelson Mandela objected. During his rape trial in 2006, Zuma appallingly said a woman dressed in a short skirt was looking for sex and that a shower after unprotected sex is an effective way of preventing the spread of Aids. Zuma personified the moral backslide.

Zuma was officially endorsed by the ANC’s leftist allies – the Congress of South African Trade Unions and Communist Party, as well as the ANC’s youth league. Sadly, the ANC’s left is in a muddle, often depending mostly on past slogans. They back Zuma mostly on emotion, rather than on clear-headedness. They mistakenly argue that once in power they will bend Zuma to their will.

But Zuma has been rather vague on what policies he will pursue when in government. He is making so many promises to all and sundry – from fundamentalist traditionalists, to businessmen, to Marxist-Leninists – that he has tied himself into a knot. Many, especially business leaders who fear that Zuma may have oversold himself to the ANC’s left, now increasingly – but wrongly – argue that perhaps Mbeki is indispensable to the country and that he should be re-elected. Sadly, given the leadership uncertainties in many developing countries, people often opt for the current incumbent because he or she is perceived to be a “strong” leader, in spite of their records.

The battle lines are now drawn between supporters of Zuma and Mbeki; whoever is elected will be opposed by the other side when in power. The result may be paralysis for years to come. Yet very obvious talent in the ANC and the country is readily available. Younger talent such as former ANC general secretary Cyril Ramaphosa, former Gauteng provincial premier Tokyo Sexwale, current deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota and former deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, are just the kind of medicine the country needs. All of them would be able to build on the best of both the Mbeki and Mandela legacies. They all represent a younger generation, schooled in the domestic wing of the ANC, with its more consultative, internally democratic and tolerant internal tradition.

New leaders of liberation movements are often elected by a select group of party elders or interest groups, often in the committee room. This is often based more on whether different interest groups would be sufficiently rewarded or safeguarded by a particular candidate. Unless the ANC break with that tradition and in its internal operations start reflecting the spirit of South Africa’s new constitutional democracy, which argues for openness and transparency in public affairs, it is unlikely that the ANC would settle on the fresh blood and new ideas that both it and the country now so desperately need.

In his short-sightedness of refusing to stand aside early and make room for the younger leaders to compete, Mbeki may make it easier for Zuma to win, and so undo Mbeki’s prized legacy of economic prudence and of making South Africa a beacon of hope and leadership for African and other developing countries.

The existential fate of the country does not depend on the election of either Zuma or Mbeki in December 2007. But the election does represent a golden opportunity to rejuvenate the country’s democracy, economy and nation-building effort and restore its social fabric. South Africa’s future prospects weigh in the balance.

The 2nd edition of WM Gumede’s book, Thabo Mbeki and Battle for the Soul of the ANC, Zed Books, is released in London in October 2007. His forthcoming book, The Democracy Gap – Africa’s Lost Years, Zed Books will be published in April 2008.