Ramaphosa will build trust if he opens up about the theft at his game farm
- Professor Mzukisi Qobo
In South Africa, leadership failures and the denigration of ethics have undermined our concept as a nation.
The sense of who we are, what we believe and what gives us collective pride is something that we can no longer grasp or imagine with confidence.
The Irish political scientist, Benedict Anderson, talks about nations as “imagined communities”. Such collective imagination imbues nations with myths and a healthy dose of pride that fuels social and economic progress.
Stirring collective imaginations and energies towards a positive end is one of the defining features of great leaders.
What enables leaders to do this is their ability to cultivate connectedness based on trust and shared interests between them and those they lead. Citizens can only trust leaders when they feel a sense of proximity, real or imagined, with them. When societies perceive a divergence between their interests and that of their leaders, confidence erodes, and a chasm of mistrust opens up between the leaders and the public.
Since the democratic change in South Africa, and especially at the end of the Mandela era, we have endured a series of leadership disappointments in ways that cut deep and scar our collective concept as a nation.
In its more than 25 years of existence as a democracy, South Africa has had only fleeting moments of superb leadership, the kind of leadership that elevates the public spirit, enriches the ethical quality of society and flickers the hope of economic progress.
Such moments were evident during the embracing of the constitutional order and nation-building during Nelson Mandela’s era, a period of high economic growth and the African Renaissance project under president Thabo Mbeki, and when President Cyril Ramaphosa stopped president Jacob Zuma’s state capture project in its track and pulled the country back from the brink.
During those phases, when we saw a light of hope, there were also intractable tendencies that contained seeds of institutional decay. These tendencies included the arms deals corruption case that began under the watch of Mandela’s presidency and haunted the Mbeki presidency, an unfinished business because some of the politically powerful perpetrators are yet to be prosecuted.
The Zuma era of state capture was particularly corrosive because it set a new — and much lower — standard of what is acceptable in public leadership and ethical conduct. At the end of Zuma’s tenure, the only credential for leadership was simply to be slightly better than Zuma, a dismally low bar. As long as you are not stealing from the public coffers, you are considered fit and proper for leadership, according to this fallen standard. Leadership is now a stampede of the average.
This erosion of standards has also filtered into the bureaucracy at various levels of government.
At this rate, it will be much harder to establish a new framework of ethical leadership in the government, because many who, under normal circumstances, would judge themselves not qualified for leadership will now be convinced that they are worthy giants.
This debasement of leadership virtue counts among the worst legacies the previous administration has left us with since the onset of democracy.
But we have new challenges to leadership, such as the recent events of criminality on Ramaphosa’s farm and its implications for ethics and leadership in the country.
It has been widely reported that there was a theft in the president’s property that the public did not know about for two years, which has raised a dizzying amount of speculation.
There are unanswered questions about the source of the foreign currency stolen from the property and whether this was declared under the South African Reserve Bank regulations and speculation that various individuals may have used the president’s property as an avenue for laundering their money and that tax laws could have been breached either by the sellers or punters in the game industry or both.
These are matters under investigation by law enforcement agencies, and the law can grind slowly as fragments of leads and evidence are painstakingly pieced together.
Aside from what the law enforcement authorities may conclude, the president has a social contract with the citizens. The public has a certain expectation of how he ought to conduct himself. They want to know that they can trust him.
If the president has erred, they want him to be candid so they can find it in themselves to reconcile with him and have proper closure rather than tarry in suspense. The cloud of smoke and silence is not helping to rebuild trust and may instead risk creating an unnecessary blot on the legacy of the president.
There is a level of esteem with which Ramaphosa is held in society even outside the political office. Most people know that he was a businessman when he took office and that he is wealthy because of his commercial enterprises that are not entangled in the state.
Very few people consider the unlikely possibility that the money on the president’s property is a result of proceeds from corruption.
It is not about the theft of public money that disturbs those who trust him and who are genuinely asking tough questions.
Rather, what is of great concern is the ethics of his dual role as a businessman and president and his perceived lack of transparency and accountability on the more specific questions that the public has rightly raised about events that took place after his money was stolen.
These incidents and how the president eventually responds to them — and not what the law enforcement agents find — will be one of the country’s significant tests of leadership and ethics.
He must choose whether he wants to be remembered by history as a cattle auctioneer or as one of the finest leaders who not only turned the country from the brink but set it on a path to prosperity.
If the latter, he may need to use all his energies to run the country, especially given the difficult economic times it is going through, and work on honing his legacy. He must close the door to private auctions until the end of his term.
Where to from here? In search of new pathways to renewing leadership and values, we must hold on to radical pragmatism and not shirk our responsibility to squeeze the president hard for accountability and transparency by appealing to his conscience — but stopping short of taking the pressure to its logical conclusion, namely, to call for him to step down, precisely because we are facing a precipice as a country and many of those baying for his blood are vultures in the garb of radical economic transformation.
Those implicated in state capture activities will be keen to weaken Ramaphosa or force him out prematurely. If they succeed, they will set the ground to further erode independent institutions in the same manner they did after the recall of Mbeki in 2007.
These revelations about the theft that took place on the president’s farm have conveniently come at the time when the governing party is gearing itself up for its December conference and the Zondo commission is releasing its explosive reports on state capture.
When leaders avoid public scrutiny, their actions negatively shape public ethics and conceptions of leadership. The president must rebuild public trust in his leadership. The best way to do so is by being candid about the events that took place on his farm two years ago.
This article first appeared on the M&G website.