Youthful zeal must be harnessed for good

Mcebo Dlamini had earlier achieved wonders raising money for cash-strapped students

I HAVE struggled to shake off the meaning of Mcebo Dlamini’s utterances about his proclaimed love for Adolf Hitler.

Many columns have been written in defence of and against Dlamini. Social media has also pronounced its judgement on the now former Wits student representative council president.

I have had my say, too, and severely criticised Dlamini because as is the case with Hendrik Verwoed, there is nothing positive to say about a man whose lasting legacy was the genocide founded on the idiotic assumption of one group of humans being greater than others purely because of their DNA make-up.

I want to propose a new argument that looks beyond Dlamini’s comments. Dlamini’s was a failure of leadership and not of intelligence or grasp of history.

Let us remember that just a few weeks before he stated his love for the Nazi mass murderer, Dlamini was in the news for the creative initiative of raising money for fellow students facing financial exclusion from Wits.

He challenged new students to contribute R100 to a fund to help students who had not received help from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme.

At the end of what Dlamini had described as the “R1 million in one month” campaign, the initiative had raised R2m with corporations and wealthier individuals donating generously.

Wits Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib, the man who was later to announce Dlamini’s sacking as the SRC president, contributed R50 000.

Anti-apartheid and human rights lawyer George Bizos, a former student at the university, had also contributed R5 000 but that did not spare him from being told that, as with all other white people, there was a Hitler in him.

Dlamini then announced that he loved Hitler, and all sympathy and goodwill he enjoyed fizzled out like an effervescent pill in water.

Whatever the spin, Dlamini was racist with an inconsistent logic. It is one thing to argue that all white South Africans, including those opposed to it, benefited from racism – and totally another to argue that each of them is a white supremacist.

As a university student and campus leader, he must have known deep down that he had made a wrong turn.

If he had not, someone in his leadership circle ought to have pointed out to him that his comments might be problematic, to put it kindly.

Dlamini is a young man with great passion and well-founded anger about the continued social and economic injustices that he and other young black people encounter, even though they are called born-frees.

As with many other young people, he will make errors of judgement that he needs to learn from. As all human beings, he is not without flaws.

One of the lessons he and other young leaders must learn is that there is virtue in collective wisdom and guidance. Actually, it is a lesson that even well-established and mature people in leadership positions will do well to remember.

Of course, this goes against the dominant narrative where organisations that practise collective leadership are often accused of being indecisive or of protecting poor leaders. Transformation of society cannot just be about replacing whites with blacks or men with women in leadership positions.

It must also be about infusing the best of the leadership styles of the different communities, and not just depend on the Harvard Business Review for the definition of leadership.

I am certain that in a different setting, a group of wise people would have prevailed on Dlamini that as a leader he had certain responsibilities

As a university student and campus leader, he must have known deep down he had made a wrong turn

that went beyond his ego. They could have told him that apologising for an ill-thought comment was not a sign of weakness.

I keep wondering where Dlamini’s parents and other older relatives have been in all this.

Dlamini’s effectiveness as a leader could have been helped by a multi-generational, multicultural leadership collaboration.

It is no idle talk that after June 16, 1976, young South Africans lost faith in the ability of the older generation to change society for the better.

The consequence of this has been that youthful zeal and righteous anger are sometimes unleashed in self-destructive ways.

My conclusion is that we are a society that is often too impatient with the young and, in turn, have a youth too dismissive of the wisdom that only time and experience can grow.

I bet there are many other Dlaminis (young people with the enthusiasm, sometimes misguided) to brighten their corners, who fall victim to their own hype.

There are the rest of us who are forever keen to see a confident young person fall on his face because we see their new ideas and confidence as markings of arrogance rather than an enthusiasm that can be nurtured for a greater good.