Lessons from Deng, in step with Madiba
President Cyril Ramaphosa concedes that his leadership style is greatly influenced by former president Nelson Mandela. He also revealed last week that he is reading about and is clearly an admirer of Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese Communist Party leader credited with the restoration of China by propelling it on a path to recovery and economic preeminence in the late 1970s after the cultural revolution.
Combined, the qualities of these leaders appear to stitch together the leadership style of SA’s fifth democratic president. While assessments of Ramaphosa’s first 100 days in office, marked last Saturday, have generally been glowing, there are some within the ANC and society who feel he has not been decisive enough.
This is blamed largely on his narrow victory over Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma at Nasrec, and the continued presence and influence of her faction and that of former president Jacob Zuma on the ANC and government, through the mixed bag of people elected to top party structures.
“Madiba … for me personally, he imparted great lessons. Madiba would be very clear about what needed to be done, but [he] would always want to take people along with him so that whatever decision needs to be taken has greater efficacy, greater acceptability and credibility and broad embrace from everyone,” the president told the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef) last week.
“That is for me one of the best lessons I learned from Madiba. [He] was not dictatorial, Madiba was not the type of leader who imposed himself on a situation. He always wanted to hear the views of other people.
“I like that style and I am better attuned to that than any other because I think it works better to hear everybody’s view and then, once that has happened, then you know that everybody has had their say.
“Even if you disagree with them, at least they had their say and then you move forward. And I think that is a better way of running anything and any organisation.”
This was a theoretical expression of the manner in which Ramaphosa has taken key decisions thus far — and explains why, for instance, his Cabinet remains a mixed bag of the old and the new. It is also no coincidence that Ramaphosa identifies with Deng, who returned to the political stage in China after being imprisoned during the cultural revolution.
Ramaphosa’s presidency, too, follows a lengthy absence, when he bided his time building his business empire. He told Sanef he admired Deng’s ability to mobilise the Chinese to focus on the new period, “unleashed between 1979 to now”.
The Chinese leader’s core traits were consensus seeking, compromise and persuasion.
This is also Ramaphosa’s key task — to usher SA into a new period after a decade of collapse and decay under Zuma, whose schizophrenic leadership style was characterised by a facade of magnanimous acceptance masking intolerance of dissent and dictatorial megalomania.
While Zuma created sycophants, Ramaphosa shuns them. Zuma had leaders in the ANC vowing to kill and die for him, and surrounded himself with those who remained silent in the face of his excesses. He appointed ministers who would do his bidding, and when they failed to do so he fired them. His Cabinet was reshuffled almost yearly, the pawns being moved as their usefulness ran out.
Ramaphosa says he only began to understand the extent of state capture after the release of the leaked Gupta e-mails, a comment many find alarming. After all, almost a year before the Gupta e-mails hit the headlines, former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas publicly released a statement on a Treasury letterhead in which he told the nation the Guptas had offered him the post of finance minister weeks before Nhlanhla Nene was removed in 2015. Either Ramaphosa was not being entirely honest about his knowledge of state capture or he was caught up in the Zuma sycophancy.
He now says he admired Madiba for not wanting to “promote this system of wanting to have sycophants .... He [Madiba] was not a cult leader or promoter and he did not want to have praise singers. Madiba believed in engagement, and in my own role that I have been asked to play, that is the path I have chosen ... I don’t want to be lionised as a great man who killed a bear on the Arctic Circle and all that. No, you’ve got to work with people and respect them.”
Ramaphosa’s difficulty now is undoing the perverse structures that were established in the public service under Zuma, although he says so far he has not experienced resistance to his vision of clean governance. Perhaps SA’s public servants are so accustomed to the system of sycophancy that they have simply gone with the prevailing wind.
Ramaphosa has accomplished much in the past 100 days and his leadership philosophy should take SA in an entirely new direction.
But he cannot unleash his full potential as a leader until he receives a convincing electoral mandate, which as things stand is a year away.
MADIBA WAS NOT DICTATORIAL, HE WAS NOT THE TYPE OF LEADER WHO IMPOSED HIMSELF... HE WANTED TO HEAR THE VIEWS OF OTHER PEOPLE