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Introduction

‘Choose your president carefully, because at the end of the day no one can save him from himself.’– Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (1991)

South Africa does not have a tradition of presidential histories. As a result, we have no body of knowledge about the sources and limitations of presidential authority. We know hardly anything about the temperaments of the men who have occupied the highest public office in the land or of what informs their decision-­making. We also don’t have a great biographical tradition, although we fare better in this respect than with presidential his­­tories. The reasons for this inattention to presidential scholarship may be deeply rooted in our history. But it may also have to do with the false belief that we elect political parties, not individuals, to govern us. If political parties are our only interest, why bother about individuals? In fact, talking about the individual qualities of our leaders is positively discouraged in our political culture. Yet the political culture of the past 20 years has been significantly shaped by the actions of individual leaders, often with dire consequences. Therein lies the irony: we tell our­selves that individuals do not matter even as our collective attention is focused on their depredations.

The absence of presidential scholarship deprives future presi­dents of any guides to how they should conduct themselves, or how we should evaluate their performance. Even though the in­clusive elections of 1994 gave us the right to govern – and mis­govern – ourselves, we remain dependent on politicians’ evalu­ations of their own performance, and on annual media report cards. Invariably, politicians trot out statistics about electricity connections, roads, houses, clinics and schools, all of which goes under the rubric of ‘service delivery’.

From Thabo Mbeki to Jacob Zuma, the refrain has been that of a ‘better life for all’. Zuma has added a twist to this by pro­claiming that ‘we are better off than we were before’. Compared to what? Apartheid? Of course, that was the whole point of the liberation struggle. And who, in their right mind, could be against a better life for anybody? But that is hardly the stuff that moves one to action.

With such banalities as a substitute for national purpose, it is difficult to argue against success, especially when you mark your own script as the ruling party. But I also remember reading from Julius Nyerere, one of our continent’s greatest leaders, that gov­ernment services are not the be-all and end-all of develop­ment, but only its means: ‘People cannot be developed; they can only develop themselves,’ he wrote in Freedom and Development (1974). ‘For, while it is possible for an outsider to build a man’s house, an outsider cannot give the man pride and self-confidence in himself as a human being. Those things a man has to create in himself by his own actions.’

It is this sense of self-reliant development that gives people a sense of dignity, or what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls ‘self-defining freedom’. Steve Biko described this con­cep­tion of freedom as follows: ‘Freedom is the ability to define one­self according to one’s possibilities, held back not by law but by God and natural surroundings.’ He went on to implement this vision through the programmes of self-reliant development for­mu­lated for the black consciousness movement.

Contrary to this vision of Nyerere and Biko – and of Immanuel Kant, who believed we are made human not by satisfying our desires but by attaining human dignity – black people remain a dependent class in South Africa. Those who do not find jobs in the formal economy are warehoused by their millions in the social grants system, deprived of the dignity that comes from self-reliant development. This is an unsustainable set of social and economic arrangements, not only for the inequality it produces but also for the social resentment it generates. This, in turn, produces the political instability glibly referred to as ‘service de­livery protests’. Protests and strikes go on for months on end with­out any leaders showing up, because they have become afraid of their people. At the heart of our leadership malaise is the absence of a common national purpose, and a collec­tive failure of imagi­nation.

There was a time when Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance promised to provide an inspirational public philosophy for trans­forming our society. However, no sooner had its author announced those lofty ideals than he was distracted by con­troversies that had little to do with the purpose of the liberation struggle, namely to move the ordinary masses of black people towards self-reliant develop­ment and self-fulfilling freedom. I have often wondered what we could have achieved in pur­suit of that purpose with the energy and resources that were instead expended on controversies about HIV/AIDS, the arms deal, Gupta­gate, Nkandla, and countless other costly distrac­tions. Those are the opportunity costs of the endless controv­ersies that have dogged our national leadership over the past twenty years.

The media do better in generating discussions of values, but this is indirectly through exposés of the corruption and mal­feas­ance in the corridors of power. I have been fortunate to be part of a group of columnists who have engaged directly with the broader political and moral questions of our time. We’ve been able to do so because we have been removed from the daily grind of news reportage. And moral questions are unavoidable when hundreds of thousands of people die from HIV/AIDS while their government denies the cause of their death, and thus refuses to do anything about it. As columnists, we have had to step back from what the American historian and public intellectual Richard Hofstadter characterised as ‘the meaning in a situation’ to rather reflect on ‘the meaning of the situation as a whole’.

The columns collected in this volume are drawn from those written over a 15-year period, from just before Thabo Mbeki’s ascent to the presidency in 1999 until just before our fifth in­clu­sive national and provincial elections in May 2014, effec­tively covering Mbeki’s entire nine-year presidency up to his resig­na­tion in 2008, and Jacob Zuma’s since then. In the absence of detailed presidential scholarship, they provide a week-by-week account of how this eventful history unfolded. I hope they will show that the quantitative decline in electoral support for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) from 1994 to 2014 did not happen over­night or without reason; it has been the result of qualitative decline in leadership over time. On a weekly basis, I watched ANC leaders slowly eat away at the high levels of trust they enjoyed among the majority of the population.

While the ANC has received a mandate to govern for another five years, the quantitative decline in its support over time – with its share of the vote dropping from almost 70 per cent under Thabo Mbeki in 2004 to 65 per cent and 62 per cent under Jacob Zuma in 2009 and 2014 respectively – should worry anyone who is con­cerned about its future. In the 2014 elections, the party had to pull out all the stops to hold on to Gauteng, eventually by a mere 53 per cent. This should worry the party, because Gauteng is not only the country’s economic heartland but also its most popu­lous province, and the most representative of the South African population. The ANC’s support also declined in all the other major metropolitan areas. This should also worry the ANC because, as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has put it, ‘while gov­ern­ments can enact policies that have the effect of depleting social capital, they have great difficulties under­stand­ing how to build it again.’

At the heart of this narrative, though, is the conduct of two presidents: Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. It is the closest an out­sider can get to a presidential history. Hopefully, those who have been in the bowels of the presidential system in this period will one day emerge to tell us what really happened – without the usual public spin – and how the grievous mistakes made could be avoided in the future. Maybe the leaders themselves will come clean one day. I wouldn’t bet on it, though; there is always the danger of legal action.

In many ways, this book built itself. The narrative structure tells it all – initial promise, followed by inexplicable failures and grave disappointment. It starts with my excitement about Mbeki’s African Renaissance, quickly followed by detours into all the dark corners where Mbeki took us during his eight years in office. The same emotional ups-and-downs characterise my approach to Zuma’s administration – initial excitement, followed by great disillusionment.

The columns also throw the spotlight on us, the citizens. I hope they show what happens when good men and women give up their power to speak out against wrongdoing. As the British phi­losopher Isaiah Berlin once put it: ‘Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully acceptable as unbreakable law. That may make for con­tent­ment, but not for understanding what it means to be human.’

But it was Matthew Arnold – Berlin’s predecessor at Oxford – who provided the prescient observation that ‘there is a natural cur­rent . . . in human affairs, [that] . . . will not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes us see not only his good side, but also how much in him was of necessity lim­ited and transient; nay, it even feels a pleasure, a sense of an increased freedom, and of an ampler future, in so doing.’ That is how South Africans responded to Mbeki, and that is how they will still respond to Zuma, or whichever leader takes their trust and goodwill for granted. That at least is what the results of the 2014 elections seem to signal.

Writing a newspaper column over such an extended period of time comes with its own hazards. First, it is a public reflection of oneself. You can tell someone’s personality by the columns they write. Many of my critics have complained about the way in which I insert myself in the story. I am not a shrink, so I can’t say why this is the case. It could be a bad case of narcissism, or that I like to claim my own voice. Two other factors may have contributed, though. When I started my doctoral studies – and there we go again, I hear you say – my supervisor complained that he could not hear my voice. He would not read my dis­ser­tation until I had learnt to write in the first person. The other reason could be related to what The Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment’s Marshall Ganz has said about narrative:

Some of us may think our personal stories don’t matter, that others won’t care, or that we shouldn’t talk about ourselves so much. On the contrary, if we do public work, we have a responsibility to give a public account of ourselves – where we came from, why we do what we do, and where we think we are going. . . . If we don’t author our story, others will – and they may tell our story in ways we may not like. Not because they are malevolent, but because others try to make sense of who we are by drawing on their experience of people whom they consider to be like us.

So that is perhaps why my writings will be punctuated with references to my family, my home town of Ginsberg in the Eastern Cape, Steve Biko, black consciousness, and the life of the mind – so that the reader can know where I am coming from, so to speak, thus to better engage about where we both need to go.

In writing these columns, I have been guided by my own inner voice, for better and for worse. In the process, I have earned as many enemies as friends, neither of whom are ever permanent. There are at least two personal criticisms that I have never really addressed. The first is that I don’t have the slightest clue about the politics of the ANC. This jibe has often been accompanied by an invitation to join the party, and stop criticising from the out­side. I could have done that a long time ago. I have indeed thought about the opportunity costs of not being in the ANC. After all, I could have pleaded fealty to the party and turned into an instant tycoon, no questions asked. I could have done the same for the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), for that mat­ter. But I think something dies in you when you do that. But I don’t know – I’ve never tried.

The second criticism is that I have been made a multi­mil­lion­aire several times over by the billionaire ANC politician Tokyo Sexwale, which is why I was so excited about him as an alter­na­tive to both Mbeki and Zuma. It’s hard to refute such allegations without showing how little money I have in the bank. The truth is that I’ve never seen, smelled or counted a million rand in my entire life. In the celebrated remark of a Gauteng politician (no names, no pack-drill): ‘I’ve never ever seen the door of a million.’

I cannot possibly address all these criticisms, just as those who have been at the sharp end of my pen could not – which is why the door for conversation between citizens and leaders should always stay open, a quality that has proven to be a major distinction between good leaders and bad ones. The only thing I can say in my defence is that my writings are motivated by a sense of shame about the direction we have taken over the past 20 years. Not only are we trapped in the path laid down for us by the system of apartheid; there does not seem to be any imaginative responses to it on the horizon. And, as Benedict Anderson has remarked, ‘if you cannot be ashamed for your country, then you do not love it.’