Songezo Zibi bent on restoring the dignity of leadership
Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi is with little doubt the most talented person to enter SA politics in the past decade. He combines three traits that together make him strikingly unusual.
The first is intellectual creativity. To listen to Zibi talk about public bureaucracies, about employment creation, about crime or foreign policy is to hear at work a mind genuinely at play. The second is charisma; he has a personal energy that draws people. When he speaks, you want to listen. The third is the most important of all: a distinctive account of what is wrong and how it might be put right.
What is that account? And what are its chances? In my understanding, Zibi is a product of the old Transkei. That is from where his understanding of SA arises. The lineage he joins begins in the late 19th century when the Eastern Cape had the densest concentration of mission stations in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some housed the finest schools open to black people in the greater region.
They thus also housed the rarest, most precious asset available: a genuinely decent education. From the last decades of the 19th century people educated at the best of those schools came to constitute a professional elite. They also had ingrained deeply the certainty that they were the leaders of their people.
Take the childhood of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Her father, Columbus Madikizela, was the headmaster of the local school at Mbongweni, and an Mpondo aristocrat to boot. That he could occupy these positions and not be a leader was inconceivable. It came with the territory. By his 30s he was indeed a member of the Bhunga, the advisory assembly in which the Transkei’s notables gathered.
But it was not just he who led; it was his family. His children’s lives were public performances, exemplifying what was possible. They were at the deepest level born to become important.
I remember Zibi telling a story about why he entered politics. When he goes home to Mqanduli in his fancy car, he said, people confront him with a question. Things in the country are not right, they say. What are you doing about it?
By Zibi’s lights, the question is natural. He is a member of the latest generation of a professional elite and is thus expected to lead; when the world is out of joint it is to those like him that people turn. And it is his duty to take up their challenge.
In my understanding, Zibi’s project is in part one of restoration. There was once an organic relationship between people and their leaders. Leadership arose from the associations of daily life: the church, the sports club, the village. The ANC used to be the great exemplar of this deep connection between leaders and people.
But when the ANC went rotten it destroyed the connection. The political class now attracts the detritus of the world into its ranks, not the country’s natural leaders. SA cannot come right, for Zibi, until the relationship between leaders and people is restored and politics recovers its dignity. Only then will people with talent and honour put up their hands to work in government bureaucracies or in politics. Until then, SA is doomed to sclerosis and failure.
On the campaign trail in the Eastern Cape Zibi avoids like the plague any association with the DA. Nor does he say that he is opposing the ANC. He says he is offering an alternative. More exactly, he is restoring an idea, still very much alive in collective memory, of how black SA leaders once represented those they led.
How much of this vision is shared by South Africans at large? Will it reach into people’s hearts? Or is it a quaint and parochial vision resonant only in pockets of the old Transkei? Zibi’s fate over the next two election cycles will answer these questions.