‘WE NEED ACCOUNTABILITY’
The ANC must start having leaders who take responsibility, or it’s the start of the party’s end, writes Chris Maxon
ACCOUNTABILITY is not simply taking the blame when something goes wrong. It’s not a confession. Accountability is about delivering on a commitment. It’s about taking responsibility for an outcome, not just a set of tasks. It’s taking initiative with thoughtful, strategic follow-through.
The judgment by our apex court set the social media on fire. The running trend was not so much about the quality of leaders and representatives but rather that people had stooped very low in their political choices.
Perhaps the judgment was more an indication, not of “stooping low” but rather of a poverty of analytical and critical thought. We have become so accustomed to believing dazedly that the political elite will take good care of us.
Last Friday, the Constitutional Court delivered what I believe is a wake-up call. The court told us clearly: parliamentarians are in the business of self-preservation.
The question of accountable leadership was brought to the fore when the court asserted that the National Assembly had failed to hold President Jacob Zuma accountable after the Nkandla ruling, which found that he failed to uphold and respect the constitution.
During the Struggle years (1980s) we advocated building of “organs of people’s power” to replace the illegitimate apartheid structures that governed the majority against its will.
It was also a response to the call by the ANC in exile to “make the country ungovernable and apartheid unworkable”.
These organs of people’s power were designed to provide real, regular, and more systemic and systematic forms through which people could participate in running society. It was a kind of democracy that would be built once apartheid was defeated.
Fast-forward to the present. Instead of Parliament representing a form of “people’s power”, we are told that the organisation (ie ANC) is supreme – dictatorship of the party, not the people!
This dictatorship of the party has been, I believe, the genesis of despotic tendencies in terms of which leaders believe they can do as they please. It took a legal challenge, not once but twice, to start smacking them into order.
For leaders, accountability starts with looking in the mirror. When someone else screws up, we tend to blame it on their personal characteristics. However, when we screw up, we tend to blame it on external circumstances. It’s a cognitive bias that social psychologists call “fundamental attribution”. Neither serves anyone well.
Leaders continue to face change and disruption. It’s clear that they need to be stronger than ever before. That is true in every type of organisation. Leadership is a solemn obligation, and all leaders need to step up and live up to those obligations every day to make their organisation stronger.
Leaders can start creating a culture of accountability by being accountable. However, being a role-model isn’t always enough to help someone else be accountable. Leaders often need to hold others accountable. Building leadership accountability also requires organisations to do some difficult things, like dealing with mediocre leaders and unaccountable ones.
This is a real challenge for most organizations, not least the governing ANC.
Too often, attempts to build strong leadership accountability are undermined because we fail to take action against leaders who are simply not prepared to be accountable.
Keeping such leaders in their roles has consequences. It sends the message to other leaders and the general populace that you are prepared to tolerate mediocrity in your organisation. It also disengages high performers, who are truly accountable, as their contributions are minimised. Worse still, it allows for patronage to thrive unchallenged and meritocracy to die a natural but untimely death.
We must also admit that the deeper crisis that the ANC faces is one of many comatose members and people in general. A fundamental weakness of the ANC is that members no longer have a material stake in their organisation.
Members used to join largely because they believed in the ideas. This is certainly how they were recruited and attracted. Others may even have joined because they believed in the organisation’s actions. But very few of these actions actually have a material impact on the lives and livelihoods of members and people in general. Leaders rarely seem even to consider that this might be a problem.
As the American socialist Hal Draper wrote: “To engage in class struggle it is not necessary to ‘believe in’ the class struggle any more than it is necessary to believe in Newton in order to fall from an aeroplane.”
Too often, though, we have engaged in building a democratic society as though we were jumping out of a plane without a parachute, confident that we have some special knowledge of the laws of gravity that will protect us from disaster.
It’s a long way down, and may even be quite pleasant and gratifying much of the time, but eventually there is the realisation that we’re racing towards Earth at 10m per second just like everybody else.
Parliamentary disputes that are not aimed at materially uplifting the people are necessarily going to be stunted.
It is for this reason that the fundamental tenet of our democracy has always been about building organs of people’s power, including Parliament, and regarding the people’s welfare as a major motivation.
The point is not that there is something morally superior about the people, but rather that the working class has a particular interest in engaging in battles to transform society.
This is entirely different to a liberal approach, which sees the role of individuals, especially those who are smarter and work harder than everybody else, as being the critical component in changing society.
Linked to transforming society is developing a culture of accountable leadership. There has never been a more important time to build a strong culture of leadership in organisations and society.
Achieving this means ensuring leaders can build relationships with one another, encouraging them to hold one another accountable, and helping them work collaboratively to drive the success of society.
The quality of leaders we deploy is pathetic! The Constitutional Court judgment is a wake-up call to all of us to take this matter very seriously. The incoming leadership of the ANC needs to reflect on these, make a very clear statement and take some action.
If an organisation wants to be built on a fundamentally democratic basis, its members need to have a stake in decisions. Not just a stake in carrying out the decisions because they helped to decide them, but a stake in the success or failure of the results of those decisions and how they were carried out. That’s the start of accountability.
In short, society built on a materialist basis would need its entire body politic to be shaped to be responsive to the material needs of the citizenry.
The citizens themselves would need to have a stake in the organs of their power and their failures and successes, much more so than in the social morale. If the citizens of this society have more of a stake in the morale than a material stake, then it’s probably not going to be a very democratic society in the long run.
Good will has nothing to do with it. Going out and bringing in a bunch of new people who agree with the majority organisation (ANC) is probably not going to improve the situation either.
On the contrary, the harder the members work “in good faith”, the worse the problem will be, because it’s the moralistic definition of “good faith effort” that is part of the problem.
If we want to get rid of perverted forms of democracy – including what we colloquially call state capture – we need to be at the forefront of the protection of democracy and realise that the first step in the revolution by the people is to win the battle for accountable leadership and restoration of Parliament as an organ of people’s (our) power!
We must realise that the first step in the people’s revolution is to achieve accountable leadership