BUMBLING LEADERSHIP While Zuma’s sins drag down SA, Trump’s follies resound worldwide
South African president shows axiom of messing up while fooling most people much of the time is losing value
In an age of increasing intolerance it is worth recalling that Voltaire did not say, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The oft-repeated phrase was coined, it seems, by a biographer in 1906 to summarise the general drift of his approach. But Voltaire did say, “Tolerance has never provoked a civil war; intolerance has covered the world in carnage.”
A Voltairian of our time, the late American writer Gore Vidal, constantly inveighed against the US’s endless conflicts, internal and external, from the McCarthy witch-hunts in the US to the Cold War. Since the end of the Second World War, he wrote, “we have been engaged in what the great historian Charles Beard called ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’.”
In the late 1970s, when reporting from Rome, I sometimes met Vidal socially and he used to predict, “When the Cold War ends, the American Empire will have to find something else to fight. It’ll probably be a war on drugs.” And it came to pass.
Since then, there have been other wars. But no American leader has so swiftly identified so many foes as President Donald Trump: Mexicans, liberals, the courts, the media and above all, Muslims. It is a grotesque mirror image of Osama bin Laden’s distinction between the “near enemy” (apostate Muslim regimes) and the “far enemy” (Western powers).
Trump clearly thrives on conflict, seemingly impervious to the consequences. Yet Vidal noted that John F Kennedy, whom he knew well, achieved his highest ratings after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. Vidal recalled JFK musing, “It would seem that the worse you f**k up in this job, the more popular you get.”
In Washington, Trump seems to be doing his best to live up to that axiom. But here, President Jacob Zuma proves that the quirky formula of screwing up while fooling most of the people much of the time is a diminishing proposition.
The Zuma administration shows that as deceptions and alternative versions of reality are laid bare, the mountebank has to resort to demonising critics with smears such as “traitor” or “enemy of the people”, as well as undermining the nation’s courts and Constitution. It has taken Zuma several years to do this. Trump has fast-tracked the process by achieving it all in his first few weeks. The result of such a self-serving approach could be seen recently in the mayhem at the president’s state of the nation address to Parliament. Respect for Zuma has sunk so low that he was reduced to addressing a half-empty chamber. The president appears to have given up trying to convince all fellow citizens of his worth or policies. Instead — a trend echoed by Trump — he only appears confident at triumphalist rallies with his own hardcore supporters.
To reach this point, Zuma has had to appoint toadies and incompetents, above all key ministers, who will deny reality and brush off established facts. He has hollowed out the National Prosecuting Authority, the top echelons of the police and the state spy agencies, which seem mostly focused on keeping an eye on internal party rivals.
Listening to government spokesmen can be as dizzying to one’s sense of reality as watching the White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, deliver his daily media briefings. During the Vietnam War, US military news conferences were so at odds with what reporters had witnessed that those briefings were known as “the Five O’Clock Follies”. Once the word of the US government had been taken as true till proven false, rued one military official, but in Vietnam, it was doubted till proven true. One could say the same for presidents Zuma and Trump, although one began as a herder, while the other was born into wealth.
Zuma, the former herder, has been in hock to several rich benefactors. His current patrons, the Guptas, are now so publicly reviled that they have resorted to the PR wiles of Bell Pottinger, the London-based dissemblers for many a scoundrel. One senior executive was caught on tape boasting about practising “the dark arts”, and it is widely suspected that Bell Pottinger is behind the renewed “white monopoly capital” offensive.
Tolstoy’s description in War and Peace of a vain leader (“a man of no convictions”) would fit both men: “The incompetence of his colleagues, the weakness and inanity of his rivals, the frankness of his falsehoods and his brilliant and self-confident mediocrity raise him to the head….” But there are significant differences between Zuma (who has a famously thick skin) and Trump (who notoriously inhabits an extremely thin skin). The key difference is that Zuma’s peccadillos drag down SA, while Trump’s aberrations and misrepresentations reverberate around the world.
Of course, Tolstoy was describing Napoleon, the instigator of serial wars. The result of which, he recorded, was that “the first 15 years of the 19th century in Europe present an extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary pursuits, tear from one end of Europe to the other, plunder and slaughter one another….”
Just over 100 years later, an identical description would fit the outbreak of the First World War. And another century on, after Trump has just announced a colossal increase in US military spending, could such a catastrophe be repeated in the 21st century?
In the widely acclaimed history of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers, Cambridge Professor Christopher Clark argues that the “Great War” was stumbled into by a fatal combination of muddle, misunderstanding, brinkmanship, bluffing and indecision, combined with deep uncertainty about shifting alliances, plus on all sides, a foolish belief that aggression could be localised and that any war would be brief.
Clark also makes a powerful case that some of the main protagonists were unconsciously caught up in a “crisis of masculinity”. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II was by turns bellicose and chest-beating, then often rapidly bac-tracked, sending conflicting messages to allies and foes alike. If that sounds like Donald Trump, there are other current similarities. “Given the interrelationships across the system, the consequences of any one action depended on the responsive actions of others, which were hard to calculate in advance, because of the opacity of the decision-making process,” wrote Clark, concluding ominously: “In this sense, the men of 1914 are our contemporaries.”