Ardern’s open leadership shows up a closed and cosseted Ramaphosa

Compared with Donald Trump, almost every leader of the free world is a paragon of virtue. Compared with Jacinda Ardern, others are like toddlers in short pants. Could President Cyril Ramaphosa learn from the prime minister of New Zealand?

Ardern has officially been Planet Earth’s Sweetheart since The Atlantic called her “the most effective leader on the planet”.

Her response to the coronavirus crisis was not the first time she has earned praise. She was catapulted into the spotlight after the Christchurch massacres just over a year ago, in which 51 people were killed and 49 wounded when white supremacists opened fire on worshippers at two mosques.

Ardern’s stirring speeches at the time have entered the realm of immortalised words. In the aftermath of the tragedy, she pushed through stringent anti-gun laws and wept while wearing a headscarf at a memorial event for the victims.

Were Ramaphosa a woman, he might have done likewise, but it’s hard to imagine Trump covering his orange head out of respect for his Muslim brothers.

This event brought the focus of the world on Ardern’s track record. She became the world’s youngest female leader when she was sworn in as Labour Party prime minister in October 2017, at the age of 37. She is only the second leader, after Benazir Bhutto, to give birth while in office. (Ardern’s 22-month-old daughter was born on Bhutto’s birthday.)

Ardern doesn’t play the gender card. In interviews she has said: “I want to be a good leader, not a good lady leader. I don’t want to be known simply as the woman who gave birth”, and “I am not the first woman to work and have a baby. There are many women who have done this before.”

Ardern has her faults and her country has its challenges. Two years ago, Reuters reported that New Zealand had the highest homelessness rate among the 35 high-income Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. It has a housing crisis, child poverty, immigration issues, environmental degradation and extreme social inequality.

In her budget speech on Thursday, Ardern announced a NZ$50bn (R551bn) Covid-19 recovery package, the biggest single allocation of funds in the history of New Zealand.

The sum and the number of jobs it will save — about 140,000 — might sound small when you consider the scale of need in SA and other countries. But proportionately, given that New Zealand has fewer than 5-million people, it is huge.

New Zealand’s success in combating the Covid-19 outbreak (out of 1,500 infected, 94% have recovered and no new cases have been confirmed since Wednesday) has been dismissed by some as merely to be expected from a small country that is geographically isolated from the rest of the world.

There’s more to it than that. Ardern has faced much criticism for a lockdown which, while not as draconian as SA’s, was not far off. It seems to have worked but now, as everywhere, the economic fallout must be addressed.

Ardern’s brave budget has not been universally welcomed in the land of the long white cloud. The money she has pledged to economic recovery will create a deficit of billions. Justifying her decision, Ardern said on Thursday, as New Zealanders prepared to go back to work after 51 days of lockdown: “We have never sugarcoated what the future will look like, but nor will we pretend there is nothing that we can do about it. Governments have choices, just as we did when we faced Covid-19. And those choices are between sit back and hope, or sit up and act. We have chosen to act.”

Swift and decisive action has not always been a touchstone of Ramaphosa’s reign. Of late some have come to doubt the firmness of his hand.

Another leaf our president could take from Ardern’s playbook is accessibility. Where CR has become remote, JA continues to talk to her nation via Facebook video posts from her home. In some of these she has appeared wearing an old sweatshirt stained with her toddler’s dinner.

No-one is claiming that our president lacks humanity, warmth or empathy — he has on many occasions demonstrated all these by the bucketload — but something seems to happen in SA whereby our leaders, once elected, become more “leaderish” and less human.

Maybe it’s the system that forces them to be surrounded by minders and cosseted by councillors that keeps them apart from us.

Or maybe we are the ones to blame for this shift. Maybe we have some sort of inferiority complex that prevents us from respecting our leaders unless they are as removed from our lives as the mythical gods on Mount Olympus.

This is a pity, and Ardern is proof that it is not necessary.