Prof. Saths Cooper
Limiting ourselves to South Africa (SA), that colonial triumph created 115 years ago that we call home, the disenfranchised majority whose land was stolen and who were excluded by Brit and Boer did produce a pantheon of exceptional leaders in all the limited spaces that they occupied.
Despite severe exclusion and restriction in all spheres of human interaction – such as education, recreation, sport, arts, worship, residential and business rights, the jobs and few professions that they could be part of – our leaders through the ages, except for the current mediocrity, captured the popular imagination of their time.
Our ancestors were responsible for creating a thriving sense of community wherever they were confined to.
Despite the tremendous formal systemic and attitudinal odds, the phalanx of laws arrayed against the black majority – African, Coloured and Asian – our leadership influenced the prevailing sense of purpose, our morality as well as the narrative against oppression and exploitation, ensuring an abiding cohesion for progress, for hope, leaving behind the deeply-traumatic scars of our terrible past, striving for a better future, together. They succeeded in igniting our innate desire, spirit, and agency to do the best we can, suffering as little as possible.
Their indisputable compassion and tireless work for common purpose, unity and community cohesion – looking out for the kids in the neighbourhood, ensuring that those worse off were taken care of, cohering beyond socio-economic barriers, being at one with one another in many respects, at one with those who bore the brunt of serially brutal colonial conquest and its latter-day crime against humanity representation, sharing the joys of any achievement, of birth, marriage and the grief of death – are almost completely lost now, save for elite gated communities and the racial Oranias that have burgeoned since democracy.
Throughout our history, our public – and not so public, but evident – leaders possessed critical traits that seem archaic now. Seemingly lost forever, caught up as we are in the disability of leaders without the filter of any decency, yet imbued with unashamed self-interest, blatant greed and clinging to whatever modicum of power they think they wield.
Our acclaimed and widely recognised political leaders exuded essential qualities of humility, respect, and sheer knowledge. Even when we disagreed, we had to contend with their gravitas. They were ethical, capable, and did not lie.
When we think of the crop of recent great leadership that SA has produced, most others pale into insignificance.
The calibre of ANC president and stalwarts’ leadership – such as SA’s first Nobel Peace Laureate Nkosi Albert John Luthuli, our last Nobel Peace Laureate and our fragile democracy’s founding president, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, and Oliver Reginald Tambo, who held the ANC together in extremely trying exile – is beyond question.
This is written on the 47th anniversary of the death of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the PAC's founding president, who was held in solitary confinement for six years after serving a three-year sentence for sedition, after he called the peaceful anti-pass campaign that saw the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, which resulted in the PAC and ANC being banned.
Of course, we had the psychologically provocative black consciousness Bantu Stephen Biko, the founding president of the SA Students’ Organisation (SASO) in 1969, and honorary president of the Black People’s Convention (BPC), who was murdered by the notorious apartheid Security Police on 12 September 1977, with the greatest number of organisations to be banned on 19 October 1977 and hundreds of activists being detained.
I would do a disservice if I didn’t mention the irrepressible Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu, SA’s second Nobel Peace Laureate, who ten years later in April 1994 inspired the Rainbow Nation.
They led by example, identifying with and truly caring for the masses of ordinary people who they led. Leading from the front, without arrogance, strengthened by the necessary duty of care for the greater majority, not their stomachs, personal wealth, power or position, their kind seems to have disappeared, replaced by a poorly educated and badly socialised mindless coterie that is “full of sound and fury … signifying nothing” (Shakespeare, Macbeth) but their incoherence and inability.
These will never achieve the greatness that comprised our erstwhile leadership that stood above the crowd, holding their own in the public good, leading people to cohere and dispel the inevitability of grinding poverty that overcomes the vast majority in the richest country on the African continent and one of the richest in the world in terms of minerals and other natural resources.
That cohort of outstanding leadership interdicted any untoward tendency, reckless sloganeering and mob mentality. When most of the world is negatively experiencing self-pity, navel-gazing, and the rise of narrow nationalist demagogues and would-be dictators, many of SA’s visible and strident leaders appear to be bereft of any seriously informed, principled approach to what confronts them.
They’re easily swayed by the lowest common, often ignorant, denominator. Patently seeking digital fame (while SA’s vast fortune lies in their grasping hands) through their latest outburst or silliness, they infest our society with further depression and hopelessness.
This latter condition can so very easily overwhelm nearly all of us at the best of times, leaving our children more confused and alienated.
The trajectory of arrogance and disdain for the majority of the people that is so evident now is not only costing the ANC but all the rest of us very dearly.
It’s uncanny that such persons who are not great, yet through weird twists of political gerrymandering “have greatness thrust upon them” (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night) simply have little insight into the chasm they’ve actively created.
Worse, they just don’t care about the consequences of their utterances and lack of appropriate action that serves society, vainly trying to feed their bloated egos. Even when they attempt to cancel their fellow leaders when they think nobody is listening.
They stopped uttering 4IR as if it was something they took seriously, yet ignored its omnipresence. We’re so far behind in all that we say we do and need to do to get us out of the rut they created for us. With many of our blessings, and silence, in the hope that candidacy for the next board or other appointment won’t be affected.
It’s only drastic change, not failed window-dressing and tiresome excuses that have become the norm, that will take us out of the deep chasm we find ourselves in. The claim of being a leader of society has worn thin, especially when the complete opposite happens in practice.
Covid was a convenient smokescreen for continued pillaging. Now the pantry is bare and no amount of fake gloss is going to change the lot of the vast majority.
How can a leader allow the poor to be further robbed, put to their extreme, while none of them is prepared to sacrifice their unsustainable salaries and outrageous perks?
Our hard-earned money, which we have to borrow against, while the rich 10% and those aiding and abetting them continue to get richer, extracting the best from SA and the majority of us, making us pay for their self-indulgent and wanton recklessness. Their control and naked capture of SA as their fiefdom has to stop.
In the nine months since their drastic decline at the polls, they live in denialism, unable to recognise how they win enemies and lose friends. SA’s political landscape has indelibly changed in the last nine months that it takes for a baby to be born. Those who birthed this with abandon, don’t care, carrying on as if nothing has changed.
President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa chaired the SASO branch that was banned at the University of the North (now Limpopo), was a member of the BPC and was detained in solitary confinement in Pretoria. He knows the value of the Formation Schools that were required for developing leadership.
The buck has to stop with him. He can if he has the courage to leave a legacy, not the disaster we confront, and will continue to confront. Are we waiting for another July 2021?
* Prof Saths Cooper, PhD, is the Chairperson of the Robben Island Museum, an ex-political prisoner, Chair of The 70s Group, a member of the International Science Council's Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science and the Past President of the Pan-African Psychology Union.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.