We need more electricity, not improvement of candles

Ispent the past fortnight celebrating a beautiful event that spoke volumes about the better angels of our country. The spirit of former president Nelson Mandela, who departed this world a decade ago, hovered over various marriage ceremonies — Indian, Islamic, Christian — all with a particular SA flair.

The bridal couple, and most of the young guests present, had cut their teeth as part of the “fallist generation” that stormed the barricades during the 2015 Fees Must Fall campaign.

That the policies they were protesting against were those of the ANC government has not deterred them from serving and rising within the organisation and in the government. The bride, Fasiha Hassan, is part of the ANC Youth League executive and the youngest member of the Gauteng provincial legislature, while her partner, Khule Duma, serves in the presidency.

That such an event is still remarkable in our nonracial, rainbow-infused SA and not yet a normal occurrence is unfortunate and shows how much further we have to travel as a nation. At the same time, South Africans were watching the launch of another presidential hopeful’s campaign at the weekend, with support from credible former antiapartheid activists.

This was followed by the Inclusivity Society Institute’s opinion polls showing the ANC achieving at least a solid 48%, if not 53%, in next year’s general election.

The challenges SA faces today are so deep-seated that we need to break the mould of the kind of leaders we have been producing. We need leaders who can build on the united, nonracial, sovereign constitutional democracy our people have achieved while taking us towards a better future.

We need leadership that moves beyond recriminations based on past behaviour and is focused on developing policies that take us out of the current economic quagmire. A leadership that dramatically improves service delivery and the quality of governance, and tackles the racial, ethnic and immigrant tensions that break down communities and the nation as a whole.

Sadly, the current leadership corps has not been particularly inspiring — whichever part of the political spectrum we look at. It brings to mind the words of the late Oren Harari of the University of San Francisco that “electric light did not come about from the continuous improvement of the candle”.

Today’s leaders are doing nothing more than trying to improve the candle. For example, over the past few years there has been a search for credible black leaders who might lead the opposition to the ANC, which has justifiably been painted as being corrupt and unjustifiably as antibusiness.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, banker-turned-activist Roger Jardine explained why we need his political movement, with him at the helm, and spoke of South Africans needing to be saved from a government with a “schizophrenic” approach to business.

This recent cattle parade of new parties and independent candidates is not a new phenomenon — it comes in the wake of the now long forgotten Agang and ”the famous “sistahood of its leader, Mamphela Ramphele and Helen Zille, then head of the DA. Then there was the ANC breakaway party COPE, led by the bromance of Mbhazima Shilowa and Mosiuoa Lekota.

The current Moonshot Pact, composed of a motley bunch of parties united by little more than their opposition to the ANC, has been struggling to find a dependable leader who can weld them into a force. This “anyone but John Steenhuisen” search is akin to looking for the holy grail.

In their criticism of the ANC it is easy to resort to what US academic David Hackett Fischer called “presentism”, where present-day ideas and perspectives are used to depict or interpret the past. Erasing the achievements of a democratic SA since the leadership of president Mandela has thus become an essential tool. Jardine can then say the “polarised politics of the past 30 years have not worked”.

South Africans wait with bated breath for a leadership that will be electric, like the fallist generation, instead of being mere pinpricks of light in the darkness.

WE NEED TO BREAK THE MOULD OF THE KIND OF LEADERS WE ARE PRODUCING