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Seeking common national values

Mail & Guardian, 5 June 1998

South Africa’s transformation project has been framed almost exclusively in political and economic terms. The introduction of a constitutional democracy has been followed by an even greater focus on economic growth. While all of this is under­standable and desirable, relatively little attention has been given to our public values. And yet the success of our democracy will probably be determined by the extent to which our political, administrative and policy institutions are informed by the values, aspirations and motivations of ordinary South Africans. This in itself requires that our leaders undertake the difficult task of distilling what might be termed common-denominator values among the many world views that characterise South African life. If Jawaharlal Nehru could frame a sense of public values for India, Julius Nyerere for Tanzania, or James Madison and Thomas Jef­fer­son for the United States, then surely our national leaders should be able to do the same for South Africa.

In many ways, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki has started on that path by calling for a national consensus, which he describes as the ‘African Renaissance’. The success of the African Renais­sance as a national ethos will, in turn, depend on the extent to which it matches the common aspirations of South Africans across political, economic and cultural divides. Equally important will be the means that are adopted to achieve such a national con­sensus – that is, the end values must be consistent with the demo­cratic means that most South Africans cherish. How can this balance be achieved in practical terms? I suggest four policy steps.

First, we must create a deliberative process of public purpose-­building that is pluralistic and even clamorous, reflecting the diversity of our society. This must be something that appeals to the idealism of most people, and must be conducted on a scale that parallels what other countries have achieved. An example that comes to mind is the framing of the United States con­sti­tu­tion, and the adoption of its Declaration of Independence. The National Endowment for the Humanities – a federal govern­ment agency – recently sponsored a National Conversation on Ameri­can Pluralism and Identity aimed at engaging the American public on the paradox of pursuing a shared American identity in the midst of pluralist diversity.

Even those who ascribe America’s success to its purpose­less­ness, and even to the exploitation and exclusion of racial minor­i­ties, now argue for a common purpose because of changed con­ditions. As the American political theorist Benjamin Barber has put it in his book A Passion for Democracy: American Essays (2000): ‘The new pressures of ecology, transnationalism, and resource scarcity in combination with the apparent bankruptcy of pri­va­tism, materialism, and economic individualism – [as well as] the pathologies and the ambivalent promises of our modernity – create conditions more inviting to the generation of public pur­poses and a public spirit than any America has ever known.’

Several books have also come out to celebrate India’s endur­ing democracy 50 years after independence – a feat which they attribute to Nehru’s concept of unity in diversity. India conti­nues to withstand the fundamentalist threat, and will most likely with­stand its current woes, because of its democratic tradition. We have also seen the rather belated, if grudging, recognition of the nation-building legacy of Nyerere in Tanzania. In December 1996, even the conservative Wall Street Journal observed that: ‘Mr Nye­rere may have been a poor economist, but he was a skilled nation-builder. He fused Tanzania’s 120 tribes into a cohesive state, pre­venting tribal conflicts plaguing so much of Africa.’

South Africa can draw some lessons from these examples with­out committing the mistakes that those countries made in their economic policies. We can at least agree that successful democracies are those that draw from their pluralist diversity in creating broadly shared understandings. We have shown that we can do this by drafting and adopting what is arguably the best constitution in the world. But we need to go beyond the for­mal­ism and rights orientation of the constitutional process to build a positive cultural leitmotif that also pays attention to our collec­tive responsibilities in the new society.

Second, a project of purpose-building must be conducted by public intellectuals who can be both supportive and critical of the national government. Public intellectuals are particularly suited to this role because they combine moral commitment to pro­gres­sive ends with a commitment to objective analyses and procedures. Their role would be to build a moral consensus that is preceded by an open airing of different viewpoints. But who and where are the public intellectuals? Black intellectuals have particular per­spectives that can inform a national conversation on the public purpose. They represent values and world experiences that have historically been locked out of the knowledge–ideas com­plex in South Africa. It is indeed worrisome that the subject of black intellectual empowerment has not received the same level of national attention and visibility as political and economic em­powerment. I submit that unless the ideas of black people are part of this knowledge–ideas complex, our freedom will be in­complete. Ideas do matter, and those who control ideas ulti­mately shape the policies that govern our lives.

One idea that is part of our living experience as black people, and underlies the process of reconciliation, is that of Ubuntu (Afri­can humanism). Ubuntu is also eminently compatible with the idea of self-reliant and people-centred development. It is such con­gruence between public values and public policies that will ulti­mately provide the basis for effective governance. It has, of course, been argued that Ubuntu is a myth which papers over the atroc­i­ties that blacks have perpetrated on each other. But, just as the existence of slavery and racist segregation does not make democ­racy any less desirable in the West, Ubuntu remains a ‘necessary myth’.

Third, to prevent ossification of the deliberative process, the debate must also be conducted through multiple institutions: the media, policy institutes, and community forums. Members of the public must be encouraged to air their views in news­papers and on radio and television call-in shows. I can anticipate fears that this would immediately cede the process to the con­trol of a generally hostile media. Perhaps it is time to explore more creative ways for inclusive public deliberation. One possibility is private funding of new policy institutes – by the new black mil­lionaires. This would not be just a matter of social responsibility, but a pragmatic investment in the generation of new ideas.

Fourth, it is imperative that we develop the next generation of South African intellectuals. To be a public intellectual should be just as prestigious among young people as being a doctor or a lawyer. Perhaps a project of public purpose-building could be the beginning of such intellectual participation by young people in the formulation of their country’s new identity. Then they could say to future generations that they were there – at the country’s founding!

An alternative to snob democracy

Mail & Guardian, 30 April 1999

The political transformation of the past ten years will no doubt go down in history as one of the most important events of the millennium – on par with the French, American, Indian, Chinese, and Russian revolutions. Some of our leading scholars have taken to talking about the ‘maturing’ and ‘consolidation’ of our democracy, and rightly so. But self-congratulation has to be accompanied by a willingness to talk frankly about our shortcomings as well.

There is a foundational flaw in our democracy that goes back to the early days of the transition, but has become a defining characteristic of our political culture. While the political transition itself was the result of mass mobilisation in the townships and villages of this country, the negotiations process was, at times, a secretive affair whose outcome hinged on the bargaining skills of the leaders of the various political parties, mainly the ANC and the National Party (NP).

Having delegated power upwards during the negotiations, we then invested in a number of political and institutional support systems consistent with the overall emphasis on elite decision-making. The centralisation of authority in national leadership; the dominant role of political parties as containers of debate, dis­content and disagreement; the party list system; the concomitant emphasis on what Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki would do for us; and the language of delivery, are but a few manifestations of an increasingly top-down political system.

All these developments run the risk of producing a split national identity. The one side would comprise a group of political and economic elites who would, by virtue of their proximate race/class distance from power, become the real, active citizens. The other would comprise a passive population that would be nothing more than what the Indian scholar Partha Chatterjee has called ‘em­piri­cal objects of government policy, not citizens who participate in the sovereignty of the state.’

Promises of delivery would become nothing less than ‘the opiate of the masses’ – the only language that the government could use to talk with its constituencies. In less than a decade, we would have gone full circle from the mass clamour for demo­cratic par­ticipation to the elite model of democracy normally associated with political snobs such as Edmund Burke and Joseph Schumpeter.

It will, of course, be argued that the negotiated transition was the only way we could have drawn back from the abyss of inter­minable racial violence. But that’s only half the answer. A full answer would have to suggest how we can build on the progress of the past to deepen democratic participation in the future. As the Yale University political scientist Ian Shapiro argues: ‘The problem with negotiated transitions is not that the institutions are imposed from above, but rather that they are not imposed in a sufficiently thoroughgoing fashion.’

And so, for me, the most important question surrounding our second set of inclusive national and provincial elections is not which party to vote for – since they all operate within the same elite model of democracy – but whether we can start talking about alternative models of democracy in this country. It seems to me that we need to go beyond the conception of democracy as the mere right to choose our leaders – which is a necessary but in­sufficient condition for democratic participation – to some kind of direct, participatory, and communicative democracy.

As Steve Biko put it in I Write What I Like (1978): ‘In a govern­ment where democracy is allowed to work, one of the principles that are normally entrenched is a feedback system, a discussion between those who formulate policy and those who must per­ceive, accept or reject policy. In other words, there must be a system of education, political education, and this does not necessarily go with literacy.’

Or, as our own great writer Es’kia Mphahlele wrote more recently, before his death in 2008: ‘We are wrong in thinking that because the government is democratically elected, therefore there is democracy. Democracy is about the relationship between the politicians and their constituencies, and the “African renaissance” must therefore go to the heart of the people in making them think democratically.’

Participation is the cardinal principle of democracy – not only because of its intrinsic value, but also because it increases the political efficacy of citizens by giving them direct training in the policies and tools of governance. Almost 200 years ago, John Stuart Mill suggested that this kind of democratic training is best obtainable at the local level, where citizens can make decisions about issues they can immediately relate to, and then generalise that knowledge to the broader, national political system.

The best example of this in this country is the black conscious­ness movement of the 1970s. Many of our current leaders in the public, private and non-profit sectors received their leader­ship training through the political education and development pro­grammes of organisations such as Black Community Pro­grammes – even if some of them would now disavow black con­sciousness politics. But, even if people do not agree with the substance of black consciousness, we can at least go back to the veritable tradition of conscientisation that was the hallmark and signal achievement of that movement.

As the development economist Albert Hirschman once ob­served, the social energies that are aroused in the course of a social move­ment do not disappear when that movement does, but are kept in storage and become available to fuel later and sometimes different social movements. Or, as the Brown Uni­versity social scientist Ashu Varshney has put it: ‘While futures are indeed created, they are not typically created on a clean slate. It is hard for nations to leave their pasts behind. The more per­tinent issue is: how does a nation reconstruct its past? Which traditions should be revived, and which ones dropped? The ideol­ogical task is to retrieve that which is valuable, and to make this selective retrieval a political reality.’

If black consciousness contributed to our current crop of lead­ers, we should ask ourselves how we can contribute to the devel­opment of future leaders in this country. I doubt very much if such contributions will happen through the procedural view of democracy as showing up at the polls once every five years. A long-term view would suggest a balance between the vertical politics of elite representation bequeathed to us by the negotia­tions process with a more horizontal politics of direct democ­racy that comes from deep within our own history.

Can the president fulfil his tryst with destiny?

Sunday Independent, 20 June 1999

‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge.’ – Jawaharlal Nehru, address to the Indian parliament on the eve of India’s independence, 14 August 1947

‘The people have spoken.’ That was president-elect Thabo Mbeki’s humble, dignified and assertive refrain at the ANC’s post-­election victory rally at Gallagher Estate in Midrand. While not as exultant as Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ speech, or John F Kennedy’s ‘ask not what your country can do for you’, Mbeki’s words will be remembered nonetheless for their self-­assured and declarative message. Mbeki will no doubt interpret what the people have said to mean an overwhelming mandate for the ANC. But I hope he will take a broader approach, as he hinted he would when he described his own inauguration as ‘a festival and a celebration of democracy’.

While there really was no mystery about which party would win the elections, voters kept on saying they were coming out in large numbers to protect South Africa’s young democracy. They stood in queues for hours on end, braving the cold, and jumping through all the administrative hoops to affirm their right to vote. In that respect, this election was a referendum about the con­dition of our democracy. As Mbeki kept saying, ‘democracy is alive and well in South Africa’.

The policy question, though, is: now that Mbeki has obtained the overwhelming mandate of the people, how will he sustain their interest in democracy until the next elections and beyond? Will he use his party’s dominant position to deepen the roots of democracy? Whether Mbeki can link his party’s interest to the national interest of building a democratic society will depend in turn on whether he can do what Mahatma Gandhi called ‘build­ing bridges’ with the people. His biggest challenge will be that of building unity and forging a national identity in a country riven by racial and economic inequality. But if Nehru could forge a pluralistic modern Indian identity in India, the world’s largest and most diverse society, Mbeki can learn from India’s imper­fect experience and Nehru’s personal experiences, which are re­mark­ably similar to his, and brilliantly portrayed in Nehru’s autobiography The Discovery of India (1946), written in prison before independence.

Like Nehru, whose father was one of the founding fathers of the Indian National Congress, Mbeki also comes from ‘struggle royalty’. While his intellectual and organisational abilities are widely recognised, this ‘pedigree’ is also an important lead­er­ship asset. Notwithstanding Nelson Mandela’s protestations about the focus on him as an individual, the truth is that people yearn for some kind of inspirational leadership that gives them hope and faith in democracy, above and beyond brick and mortar issues. As Mbeki pointed out in his inaugural address, it is now up to him and all of us to advance the demo­cratic ideals of his father’s generation.

Both Nehru and Mbeki can be described as detribalised intel­lectuals who were educated outside their traditional communi­ties, but given the historical responsibility of building democracy in their societies. Nehru was educated at two of England’s most prestigious institutions: Harrow and Cambridge. Once, at a public rally with the great Mahatma Gandhi, he asked: ‘What do I have in common with these people?’ Mbeki was educated at the Uni­versity of Sussex, and hobnobbed with members of British high society. His attendance last December of a ceremony to wel­come him back to his home at Idutywa in the Eastern Cape after many years in exile was perhaps an attempt to start build­ing bridges with his traditional roots. Hope­fully, he will take Gandhi’s and even Mandela’s connection with traditional communities more seriously than Nehru was ever able to, without pretending to be what he is not.

Much has been said about Mbeki’s ‘formality’ as an impedi­ment to his ability to connect with the people. But it’s also impor­tant that Mbeki should be himself, and he may be sur­prised to learn that people like him just the way he is. Gimmicks such as dressing informally will go only a certain distance. What is more important is whether he comes across as a leader who is respectful of the people.

Mbeki should muster his personal strengths and abilities to keep to the former, for that is where his legacy lies. What people will most appreciate is his respect for their ideas, and their ways of doing things. One practical suggestion is for him to go back to the townships and villages he visited during the election cam­paign to engage people directly in the policy process. If he could do it in the short space of an election campaign, he can surely do it during the term of his administration.

Finally, if Mbeki is going to translate the overwhelming vote for the ANC into a victory for our society, he should also build bridges with civil society. As the American political philosopher Michael Walzer has noted: ‘No state can survive if it is alienated from civil society. . . . The production and reproduction of loyalty, civility, political competence and trust in authority are never the work of the state alone, and the effort to go it alone – one mean­ing of totalitarianism – is doomed to failure.’

Also instructive for Mbeki on this matter would be the follow­ing remarks by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere at a workshop I orga­nised in October 1997 at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference centre in Bellagio, Italy:

We committed two basic mistakes in Tanzania. First, we abol­ished local government. We thought local officials did not have the vision that we had at the national level. They seemed not to realise how urgent the business of transformation was. I had been writing all these things about freedom and participation and yet taking away power from down there and centralising it in national government because I thought things would move quick­er. That was one basic mistake. Second, we abolished the co­oper­a­tive movement. During the process of the liberation struggle we had built up a strong cooperative movement as an economic power base for the people, and now we were abolishing it. How­ever, it soon became clear that we could not sustain the path of a centralised bureaucracy. We had to make government respon­sive and accountable to the people. That’s when I started call­ing for a multiparty democracy. I had thought I could reform the party from within, but the inertia of corruption was too heavy. The pressure had to come from outside. In addition to political parties, we had to build self-governing com­­munities and peo­ple’s organisations.

Mbeki’s historical responsibility is therefore to make sure that we don’t make the same mistakes. There’s one final inter­national parallel I would like to draw. Just as Thomas Jefferson followed George Washington in founding the United States, and Nehru followed in Gandhi’s footsteps, Mbeki follows in the steps of the towering Nelson Mandela. Like those other ‘crown princes’, Mbeki has an historic opportunity to help us develop a positive national consciousness and identity. That is his tryst with des­tiny. Whether or not he will fulfil it will be for future generations to tell. It is that long-term perspective which differentiates nation-­builders from party builders.

Will he who strikes the presidential pose add body to democracy’s slight frame?

Sunday Independent, 27 June 1999

‘Material poverty is bad enough; coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.’ – Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (1976)

‘People, especially, poor and degraded people, are also hungry for meaning, identity, and self-worth.’ – Cornel West, Race Matters (1992)

Last week, I suggested that Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration speech had not been as exultant and inspirational as it should have been. He seemed tired, unrehearsed, and just out of it – even though the content of the speech was serious enough to make tears well up in one’s eyes.

This week, in his ‘state of the nation’ address to parliament, we saw a different Mbeki: relaxed, poised, and clearly familiar with the subject at hand. I have seen American presidents give ‘state of the union’ speeches before, and this one must rank up there with the best. Mbeki’s last such performance was his ‘I am an African’ speech to parliament in 1996. All of this leads me to one conclusion: Mbeki is much more at home in the formal setting of parliament than at mass gatherings. Maybe his aides should think about having him give his most important addresses in parliament. This was vintage Mbeki at his brilliant best: artic­u­late, consistent, and analytical. In fact, I would go on to suggest that some of this is what he should have said at his inauguration.

For the first time, I heard him articulate a vision for South Africa, which he described as the ‘caring society’. He spoke of the need to ‘give birth to something new, good and beautiful to replace the old order’s law of the jungle’. Yes, Mbeki has been on the stump before, talking about the need for moral regen­era­tion as the basis of the African Renaissance. But until now he has never – at least as head of state – spoken systematically about the African Renaissance as the basis of what the French philos­opher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the ‘civil religion’: a new set of values for our common national identity. I have always maintained that South Africa’s ability to project the African Re­naissance across the continent will ultimately depend on us ask­ing ourselves what it means to be South African and African.

I am therefore heartened by the fact that Mbeki will be bring­ing issues of nation-building and linguistic pluralism to the cen­tre of his governance. I was also heartened to hear the president say that ‘no one should feel that sense of alienation which drives peo­ple into peripheral existence’. As the American political theorist Michael Walzer has written: ‘When minorities are free to celebrate their histories, remember their dead, and shape in part the edu­cation of their children, they are more likely to be harmless than when they are unfree.’

As South Africans, we have done a great job with developing procedural democracy – elections, constitutions, courts, and so on. What we need now is to fill these structures with content. What Mbeki can help us do is to build a more substantive democ­racy, with clearly identifiable public values. Moving from vision to policy, Mbeki outlined in his speech a laundry list of policy initiatives that make broad generalists such as myself yawn and, like some members of parliament, drop off to sleep. Here too Mbeki demonstrated a level of comfort with policy that most heads of state do not have. The only other president I can think of with such a grasp of public policy is America’s Bill Clinton.

Mbeki also did what he does best. He is perhaps one of the finest practitioners of the art of co-option – ask the Azanian Peo­ple’s Organisation (AZAPO) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) how he co-opted their language of pan-Africanism and turned them into ineffective opposition parties in the black com­munity. He deprived the opposition parties of anything to fault him on. After all, who could be against added efforts to combat crime, or enhanced services for the disabled? Tony Leon, leader of the official opposition, had to battle to find something nega­tive to say about the speech. By the way, our opposition leaders should know that it is okay to applaud during a state-of-the-nation address. Afterwards, they can go to the media and give their responses. This is about the nation and not just party poli­tics, and Mbeki is the country’s president, not just the ANC’s.

What Mbeki has done brilliantly is to take his broad vision of faranani, or partnership, and extend it beyond the policy arena. For far too long we have been talking about service delivery out­side a broader philosophical vision of ourselves as a society, such as the caring or people-centred society he spoke about. I have argued before that service delivery is a potentially dangerous con­cept if separated from issues of self-reliance and long-term capacity-­building. The philosophical concept of faranani should be used to call on communities to assume greater responsibility for their own development. What we need is a mind-shift at the level of the community – from a democracy based on claim-making to one based on carrying out our responsibilities as citi­zens. This can be done through the co-operative movements which Mbeki spoke about.

Those who wish him well, and I include myself among them, find Mbeki frustrating. On the one hand, he has the potential to be one of the greatest African leaders, and a true visionary for South Africa. On the other, he seems guarded, held back by who knows what. Paradoxically, Mbeki should realise that his success lies in letting others take ownership of his agenda. Otherwise, we will continue to get flashes of brilliance only – like we did this time around.

The potential for Thabo’s ‘renaissance’

Mail & Guardian, 2–8 July 1999

‘Where are the black intellectuals?’, Thabo Mbeki has often asked. I would urge him to consider an even larger and prior question: where is the intellectual environment required for the emergence of those intellectuals?

It is a known fact that black people have historically been ex­cluded from what I have previously called the ‘knowledge–ideas complex’. It consists of interlocking, mutually supportive and impenetrable relationships among white intellectuals, in fields ranging from literary criticism to urban planning. Because of their strategic position at the cusp of intellectual and cultural pro­duction, white intellectuals have been able to disproportionately project their values on to our public morality and public policies. Our constitution, bill of rights, and the rules and rituals of polit­i­cal decision-making have a liberal western outlook. Happily, the values of justice and fairness enshrined in the constitution co­incide with the values of most South Africans.

But why should black people continue to be coincidental in shap­ing the national political culture? Are there ways of increas­ing black participation in its making? Moving from a procedural democracy comprising western-type institutions to a more sub­stan­tive democracy might create new spaces for black intellec­tuals. Creating a proper intellectual environment is therefore inextric­ably tied to a larger question: where is the social vision that chal­lenges intellectuals to bring out the best in them? How might we then begin to facilitate greater black intellectual participation in the endeavour of nation-building?

Let’s start with the question of a social vision, and end with some ideas on what we can do about the intellectual environ­ment. The absence of a social vision has undermined black intel­­lectual participation in public life in many ways. For example, during our recent elections, I noticed a racial division of labour in the public discourse. White political parties and intellectuals dominated the discussion of broader democratic values and prin­­ciples. In the words of my fellow columnist Steven Friedman, the right issues were being raised by the wrong people. However dubious their motivations were for opposing an ANC two-thirds majority, their language was framed in terms of democratic prin­­ciples. Black parties and intellectuals, on the other hand, seemed stuck in the discourse of delivery, as if they had become more knowledgeable about building houses than building nations.

This is not to say that there isn’t a tiny minority of black scho­lars working on issues of democracy, but rather to ask whether we have anything resembling the substantive society-wide dis­cus­sions that took place among the French philosophes in the 18th century; in the 13 states of pre-independence United States; in India in the 1950s; and in South Africa itself during the struggle against apartheid.

All of that energy has dissipated under the weight of post-apartheid technocracy and materialism. Winning government contracts has become more important than reading and writing – the essence of the intellectual function.

Getting to the intellectual environment, I am struck by the ab­sence of institutions in which people of ideas can get together to engage each other and the public on the democratic experience. We talk to each other only through newspapers, radio, tele­vision and, for the lucky few, the Internet. The ideas that float in the public domain are never followed up and interrogated in any in-depth manner with members of the public. If South Africa is ever going to be the winning nation that Mbeki talks about, we have to know how to become a learning society first – in the manner that organisational gurus talk about learning organisations.

One practical suggestion would be to introduce topics such as nation-building and pluralism in the agendas of existing com­mu­nity forums. Members of parliament could also use their con­stit­uency meetings to talk about issues that pertain to our identity as a nation. Something drastic should also be done about the state of university salaries; as long as universities remain underfunded, the perception will continue that the intellectual function is not a priority in our national development. Young people will continue to shun academic careers for as long as they see them as not pres­tigious or lucrative enough.

Perhaps Mbeki and the minister of education, Kader Asmal, should have a tête-à-tête about how the state of the universities prevents the emergence of a black intellectual class – most of whose members do not have inheritances like their white coun­ter­parts. But being black is not a sufficient condition in and of itself for playing a progressive role in the articulation of a new national identity. Black intellectuals should learn some lessons from the negative example of black economic empowerment; we should avoid a situation where a group of self-anointed elites become the high priests of black intellectual life. Nor should we allow envy and petty jealousies – that great affliction of for­mer­ly oppressed people everywhere – to interfere with intellectual collaboration.

One of the weirdest things I have heard is that there is a grow­ing divide in our intellectual community between those who have attended American and European universities and those who remained behind, or attended African universities. Seemingly, the latter are the true intellectual arbiters of the African expe­ri­ence, while the former are pawns in a grand white scheme to deny Africa its true intellectuals. Rubbish; let’s just get on with it.

We should also be careful that black self-determination does not turn into a blind black jingoism. The challenge is to make sure that a healthy black nationalism is not turned into a degen­erate anti-whiteism. People like Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe were able to avoid that fate through their relationships with whites. We should challenge the dictionary-based, and therefore static, definitions of who Africans are that have come from some black scholars. We need definitions that evolve and express our chang­ing circumstances, aspirations, and position in the world.

It is that improvisational approach to identity that made it pos­sible for Biko and his black consciousness comrades to redefine blackness to include coloureds and Indians. That is why Mal­colm X came back from Mecca a changed man – less essential­is­tic about the white man as the ‘devil’. Just as we speak of Arabian-Africans like Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, we should be able to talk of Jewish-Africans, Italian-Africans, or whatever. Improvisa­tion, adaptation, hospitality, generosity and inclusion are at the heart of the African personality, encapsulated in the notion of Ubuntu. Black intellectuals have the potential to bring those values to bear on the process of generating a new social vision for South Africa. But that’s all it is at this point: a potential.

Mbeki, visionary at large, is the manager at home

Sunday Independent, 6 February 2000

In his seminal article ‘Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?’, the Harvard University leadership guru Abe Zaleznik argues that managers and leaders are indeed different kinds of personalities. Managers value stability, predictability, efficiency, and rational control over organisational processes. They are infatuated with strategy. Leaders, on the other hand, are in a constant process of what Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruc­tion’. In fact, leadership arises out of the ability to mobilise people around what may initially seem to be hopeless causes.

While managers rely on mounds of strategy manuals to guide their action, leaders inspire change through sheer talent, imagi­nation, intuition, and effective relationships with followers. Draw­ing on William James’s classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), Zaleznik describes managers as once-born people for their reluctance to venture beyond inherited patterns, and leaders as twice-born people for their restless search for change. To paraphrase the late Robert Kennedy, managers see things as they are, and ask why; leaders see things as they never were, and ask why not.

President Thabo Mbeki possesses both leadership and man­agerial qualities, but displays them at different levels. He has been a visionary leader on the global stage. South Africa and the African continent at large could not have asked for a better spokesperson in world forums – whether we are talking about the United Nations, the European Union, the G-8, the Com­mon­wealth or the World Economic Forum. He has almost single­handedly placed the idea of the African Renaissance at the centre of global policy discussions.

As South Africans, we should be thankful for the manner in which he has shepherded our country back into the community of nations, establishing important bilateral relations with power­ful nations such as the United States, Britain, and China. His experience as head of the ANC’s international mission in exile helped hone the grace, comfort, skills and talent he shows at these forums. However, the opposite is true of the president’s per­formance on the domestic front, where he has acted more like a manager concerned with strategic problem-solving. Here, he has followed a frenetic pace of institution-building, administrative reform, and legislative enactments.

While the president has shown bold leadership in respect of racial transformation, he has been more guarded on the econ­o­mic front. Given that there is greater consensus on the need for racial redress than there is around economic policy, the man­­age­rial strategist in him knows which fight not to pick. The managerial mystique extends beyond economic policy to domes­tic policy in general. There is a widely held perception that the president is a stickler for detail. Cabinet ministers are like man­agers directly accountable to the chief executive. As it happens in many organisations, daily transactional leadership has been substituted for long-term visionary and inspirational leadership around issues of values. This is what James MacGregor Burns would call ‘transformational leadership’. The privileging of stra­tegic details gains a momentum of its own, and detracts from the development of an overarching leitmotif for the country. Loyalty, survival, and ‘not rocking the boat’– the hallmarks of mana­gerial­ism – take precedence over risk-taking, experimentation and innovation – the hallmarks of leadership.

And so, here we are with a president whose leadership poten­tial, at least on the domestic front, remains half-fulfilled: a global leader of the African Renaissance shrouded in managerial mys­tique at home, a leader of racial transformation held back by the strategic managerialism of economic and domestic policy.

Plot debacle suggests opposition is the new treason

Sunday Independent, 29 April 2001

I was at a private dinner with former United States president Bill Clinton in Johannesburg the other day when my cellphone rang. What a rude intrusion, I thought, as I fumbled for the phone. It was one of my friends. ‘Hey man, turn on the TV! The minister of safety and security, Steve Tshwete, is alleging that Cyril Rama­phosa, Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa have been spreading rumours that Thabo Mbeki was involved in the murder of Chris Hani!’

Here we go again, I thought. Our politics have become an embar­rass­ment, a joke and a farce. Our political leaders have given official sanction to the insidious and deadly politics of rumour-monger­ing. One of the dinner guests asked: ‘What if the move­ment hot­heads just decide to go and shoot the alleged plotters?’ After all, we come from a history of blind loyalty during the anti-apartheid struggle in which the slightest disagreement could lead to instant death. All that was needed to eliminate a political enemy was for someone to shout ‘impimpi!’ (informer). And how long would it take before we all got caught up in ever-widening intrigues about who’s plotting against whom? Are we really be­coming just another banana republic in which power is wielded through political in­trigue? What price political power?

I believe the answers to these questions will be revealed in how the public responds to Tshwete’s allegations. Let me begin with the scarier response. The day after the minister’s remarks, I got into my car and drove to my home town of Ginsberg in Eastern Cape. As soon as I arrived, I stopped off at one of my favourite watering holes, and found tongues wagging. One guy said: ‘Kungaqhuma kubasiwe (there is no smoke without fire); the minister would not have said it if it wasn’t true. Those three guys are ambitious.’ Another one chimed in: ‘Thabo must now get the support of the Xhosa people.’ And then a conspira­to­r­ial masterpiece that could have come out of a John le Carré novel: ‘You see, Cyril, Tokyo and Mathews were involved in the arms deal, and Thabo wanted to expose them. That is why they want to remove him.’ All this would be comical if it wasn’t so dangerous.

By contrast, Nelson Mandela has shown us the way to respond to this politics of innuendo. Ever the honourable statesman, he spoke for many people when he came out in defence of the integrity of the three alleged ‘plotters’. I suppose he was demon­strating, as only he knows how, that democratic leadership is first and foremost about building trust, and not about sowing suspicion and division.

The political economist Albert Hirschman once drew a dis­tinc­tion between social capital such as trust and financial capital such as money. Whereas money decreases with frequent use, trust accumulates through frequent use. The question then is whether Mbeki and his party have done enough to build the social trust necessary for citizens to compete openly for political office with­out fear of being labelled plotters. Mbeki and the ANC must face the challenge that democratically elected leaders face all around the world: they must either shape up or ship out. And we must get to a point where that is a ready sanction for our leaders. Challenges to leadership should be viewed as demo­cratic con­testation instead of ‘plots’.

Countdown to the politics of adaptation has begun

Sunday Independent, 6 May 2001

The other night, I watched the ANC MP Mnyamezeli Booi on television congratulating the minister of safety and security, Steve Tshwete, on a job well done. I have known ‘Nyamie’ since our days in the student movement in the mid-1980s. His loyalty to the ANC was unshakeable, and by the looks of things it still is. My incredulity at his song of praise for the minister was therefore tempered by my prior understanding of this long-standing loyalty.

For Nyamie, organisational survival supersedes consider­ations about the external environment to which the organisation must appeal for support. Implicit in the primacy of the organisation over society is a deeply held belief in the indispensability of the ANC. As if attesting to this, Tshwete treated parliament as nothing more than a temporary inconvenience, declaring: ‘I have to fly to Pretoria now.’

He could do this because he has the backing of the party bosses in parliament. But, contrary to the leadership’s expec­ta­tions, the insistence on unity has often led to party fragmen­tation as voters compete over interests. As the sociologist Alvin Gouldner cautioned, ‘organisational survival is possible only in icy stasis in which security, continuity, and stability are the key terms’. Needless to say, the ANC members of the portfolio com­mittee on safety and security chose to err on the side of ‘icy stasis’ and let him off the hook.

I welcome the attempts by the head of the ANC presidency, Smuts Ngonyama, to own up to the damage that the minister’s statements have done to the country. But the instinct for orga­ni­sational face-saving kept showing through his retractions, which sometimes sounded like ‘non-retraction retractions’. I mean, it’s rather ludicrous for the ANC leadership to commit a major blun­der such as implicating three senior public figures in a plot to oust the president, and then to turn around and blame the media. It is equally irresponsible to suggest that Tshwete’s comments were a matter of opinion. As for the argument that Tshwete did not have the benefit of hindsight that his critics have, may I simply suggest that we elect leaders precisely because they presumably exercise the political judgment needed to avert poli­t­ical disasters?

I have deliberately juxtaposed Nyamie’s and Smuts’s responses to suggest a choice for the president, the person where the buck ultimately stops. The choice is between the politics of organisa­tional survival which has inevitably culminated in the current politics of intrigue on the one hand, and a politics of adaptation in which the party leadership goes beyond its narrow organisa­tional concerns to address those of the broader society on the other. I submit that the mounting crises in the ruling party and government are intricately bound up with the politics of organi­s­ational survival.

And yet, potential crises will only be averted when there is a more open, less defensive organisational culture within the ANC. The question is whether the president will embrace and lead this politics of adaptation, or this will require a new leader. Mbeki has three more years to either dig us further into this rut or to perma­nently lead us out of it. The countdown begins.

Hybrid child Mbeki would do well to use selective retrieval

Sunday Independent, 13 January 2002

Ninety years of a struggle that culminated in a victory over one of the most heinous political systems of the 20th century do indeed call for a celebration. But history is important also because it can serve as a guide to present and future action. Indeed, a cursory look into the history of the ANC has helped me develop my own theory of President Thabo Mbeki’s leadership. The essence of my theory is that Mbeki is a hybrid child of the three different strands of African nationalism that have evolved since the late 19th century.

The first strand goes back to the early conservatism of ANC founders such as John Dube and Pixley ka Seme. Those leaders studied in the United States and became part of a growing glo­bal African nationalism led by people such as W E B Du Bois and Booker T Washington. Those early ANC leaders had a com­plete disdain for any notion of a radical mass politics. Dube even warned that ‘unless there is radical change soon, herein lies a fer­tile breeding ground for hot-headed agitators amongst us Natives, who might prove to be a bigger menace to this country than is generally realized today. Let us all labour to forestall them.’ How does this early history link to Mbeki’s leadership today, and what historical lessons can the president take from it?

There is indeed in Mbeki’s leadership style the patrician, cere­bral politics of those early leaders. Contrary to the dismay we often express about tensions between the president and his socia­l­ist alliance partners, the historical record shows this is not a new tension in the ANC. After all, Mbeki’s idol Pixley ka Seme ousted the ANC president Josiah Gumede because Gumede suggested links with the Soviet Union. But Seme also presided over the most precipitous decline of the ANC. As Gail Gerhardt has put it: ‘Under his autocratic leadership, the ANC had declined in the 1930s into an annual conclave of his own sycophantic personal followers.’ The first historical lesson is that the current president must avoid Seme’s fate, much as he admires him.

Paradoxically, the second strand of African nationalism to inform Mbeki’s leadership comes from the radical nationalism of the ANC Youth League of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, A P Mda, Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. This generation ushered in the mass politics of the 1940s and 1950s. The more radical among them formed the PAC. Mbeki’s critique of white racism could only have come from the legacy of this generation. Seme would have recoiled at such audacity. But even for this second generation of nationalists, ideas such as pan-Africanism were still the domain of the political elites. It is of no small social significance that Sobukwe was called ‘Prof’. The his­torical lesson for Mbeki from this period is that even the most radical nationalism is not exempt from the demands of political decentralisation.

If the president is to overcome the limitations of the two na­tionalisms, he must look to the third strand of the community-based cultural nationalism of the black consciousness movement. This movement produced a new cultural vision of society through everyday popular culture, even though the movement itself was started by student elites. That’s the way to go, Mr President! As an academic friend of mine puts it: ‘While futures are indeed created, they are not typically created on a clean slate. It is hard for nations to leave their pasts behind. The ideological task is to retrieve that which is valuable, and to make this selective retrieval a political reality.’