South Africa keeps trying to fix its leadership problem through better systems, but the harder question is whether we are paying enough attention to the people running those systems.
South Africa has spent years trying to solve its leadership crisis. We have strengthened governance frameworks, established commissions of inquiry, rewritten policies and introduced new accountability mechanisms. Yet the failures continue.
Then we are asking the wrong question. The problem may not simply be that South Africa has bad leaders, it may be that we have failed to understand the deeper human crisis from which our leadership emerges.
In an earlier op-ed, I argued that infrastructure delivery starts with leadership, not concrete. Some of South Africa’s most costly infrastructure failures are not simply engineering or financial failures. They are failures of leadership, oversight and execution.
The conventional response is to demand better systems, stronger governance and greater accountability. All are necessary, but they may not be sufficient.
What if we are treating the symptoms while leaving the underlying problem untouched?
According to Dr Mzamo Masito, author of This Country Hates Our Men (Boys), recently published an opinion piece titled “We Are Led and Governed by Damaged People: A Behavioural and Psychological Indictment of Power in South Africa”. His argument is deliberately provocative: South Africa’s challenge may not only be one of competence or governance, but also of behaviour and the people who occupy positions of power.
Masito draws on the concept of the “dark tetrad” of personality traits. While his argument should not be treated as a clinical diagnosis of South African leadership, it raises an important question: what happens when the quality of the person exercising power is treated as secondary to the quality of the system around them?
Listen to the recurring refrain from South Africa’s commissions of inquiry and public investigations. We have a leadership crisis. We have good policies but poor implementation. The problem is not necessarily the absence of rules, but the people responsible for applying them.
Anyone who has implemented anything knows that execution comes down to people.
A person can get an MBA, understand governance, and master financial controls. None of this tells us how they will behave when confronted with power, fear, temptation, uncertainty or failure.
A person can have the right qualifications, access to sophisticated technology and operate within a well-designed governance framework. None of these guarantee sound judgment.
What happens when the person making the decision lacks the self-awareness, resilience, curiosity or ethical grounding needed to withstand power and pressure?
This is the question we rarely ask. We are comfortable talking about competence because competence can be measured. We can assess qualifications, experience, performance indicators and financial results.
Character is harder to measure, so is interiority: the inner world of the person making the decision.
Yet some of South Africa’s failures should force us to confront this dimension of leadership.
Infrastructure projects can multiply in cost. Public institutions can fail the very people they were proven to serve. State capture can occur despite institutions designed to prevent it. Corporate scandals can destroy enormous amounts of value. Violent crime can become so pervasive that citizens organise their lives around the possibility of becoming victims.
These cannot all be dismissed as isolated administrative failures. There appears to be something deeper at work.
And because societies are made up of individuals, this raises an uncomfortable question: what kind of leadership can we expect a society to produce if we refuse to examine the human beings from whom that leadership emerges?
We should stop asking only how to fix leaders and start asking how leaders are formed.
Work by Zelda Knight, a University of Johannesburg academic and psychotherapist, on intergenerational trauma points to the complex psychological histories that individuals can carry into adulthood, relationships, and positions of influence.
This matters because leadership is not simply a technical function. A person can get an MBA, understand governance and master financial controls. None of this tells us how they will behave when confronted with power, fear, temptation, uncertainty or failure.
That is where interiority becomes important and it is about to become even more important.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the relationship between humans, information and decision-making. AI will give leaders unprecedented computational power. It will help organisations analyse enormous amounts of information, automate processes and generate solutions at a scale previously unimaginable.
But technology does not remove human judgment. It makes the quality of that judgment more important.
The more powerful our tools become, the more consequential the person using them becomes.
For Africa, this is particularly important. The continent’s fast-growing youth population could become one of its greatest competitive advantages. By 2040, one in four people globally is projected to be African.
But demographics do not automatically create prosperity, people do.
Africa’s advantage in the next technological revolution will depend on the quality of its human capability: how people think, how they learn, how they respond to complexity and how responsibly they exercise power.
This means that solving the leadership crisis requires more than another governance framework. We need to pay greater attention to the human being behind the position.
Three qualities may offer a useful starting point: curiosity, resilience and oneness. Curiosity keeps leaders willing to question their assumptions, learn and adapt.
Resilience determines how they respond when circumstances become difficult, uncertain or uncomfortable.
Oneness speaks to a deeper coherence with oneself and with others. It asks whether leaders understand themselves well enough to exercise power without becoming disconnected from its consequences.
Together, these qualities offer another way of thinking about leadership. They do not replace competence, governance or accountability.
They sit beneath them. When a leader confronts a high-stakes decision, the dashboard may provide the information. The governance framework may provide the rules. Artificial intelligence may offer the options.
But somebody still must decide. And that decision will be shaped by the person sitting behind the dashboard. Then South Africa’s leadership crisis is only the visible part of a deeper crisis.
The real crisis is our failure to understand, develop and assess the human beings to whom we entrust power.
If we want better leaders, we cannot only build better systems around them. We must also become more serious about building the people within them.
• Dr Murendeni Liphadzi is the deputy director of the Sustainable Human Settlement and Construction Research Centre within the department of construction management and quantity surveying at the University of Johannesburg (UJ).
• Hahangwivhawe Liphadzi is a South African collaborator, storyteller, ecosystem developer and certified policy expert who co-founded AudioBook Masters (as Business Director) to preserve and share African oral storytelling traditions through audiobooks
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