LUCKY MATHEBULA | When public office loses its temper, public representativeness is the casualty

To remain silent while the public sphere degenerates into a flowing sewer of political sludge is to enter into collusion of a special type with the odour.

Johannesburg is not an inconsequential municipality. It is arguably the commercial capital of the African continent, and a premium must therefore be placed on the calibre, judgment and temperament of those who lead it.

The response of mayor Dada Morero to a resident cannot be spin-doctored away, sanitised by party communications or excused by the provocation that preceded it.

At precisely the moment when the ANC seeks to showcase leaders supposedly shaped by its programme of renewal and rebuilding, it did not need the spectacle delivered by its Johannesburg mayor at a community meeting.

Morero’s choice to issue the rebuke in the vernacular gave the exchange an unmistakable force. It was not the language of an official momentarily searching for diplomatic words. It was the language of a man asserting the authority of both his person and his office, and doing so without restraint.

The episode is therefore not merely an unfortunate outburst. It is evidence that, in the very build-up to its promised renewal, the ANC may still be mired in a leadership crisis.

The party has only just emerged from a punishing and reputation-liquidating indecision over who should carry its mayoral flag. The Morero rant, broadcast live and circulated without mercy, may have made one part of that decision brutally simple: it supplied a public reason to eliminate him from the contest.

The bare truth is that people do not follow titles, degrees or accumulated years in office. They do not follow leaders governed by their emotions, and they do not vote enthusiastically for representatives who answer disrespect with more disrespect. They follow human beings they can trust: leaders who are honest, humble and recognisably human. These qualities sound elementary in theory and remain astonishingly rare in practice.

Crisis is the acid test of leadership. Anyone who fails that test in a community hall cannot casually be entrusted with the political, fiscal and social complexity called Johannesburg.

The ANC now confronts contending pressures in its Johannesburg mayoral choice that push against one another in ways that are incongruous and, at times, bizarre.

Yet judgment should not become lazy moralism. Morero has endured situations more severe than that fateful meeting without producing conduct of this kind. Any honest verdict must therefore confront the question the incident itself raises: what was it about being called a criminal, by this particular resident and in this particular setting, that generated so despicable a response? Political analysis must account for provocation even when it refuses to convert provocation into an alibi.

Whichever way that context is framed, Morero has placed the office he holds, the person he is and the political party whose face he has become into disrepute.

The swift exchange of apologies between him and his detractor is a bandage laid over a fresh reputation-fracturing wound. An apology can settle a personal quarrel; it cannot erase a public record. Unfortunately for Morero and the ANC, the utterances are now part of the frame through which voters will make decisions about him.

For the undecided voter, the matter has been simplified: in his absence, some may again be persuaded to give the ANC a hearing.

The ANC now confronts contending pressures in its Johannesburg mayoral choice that push against one another in ways that are incongruous and, at times, bizarre. There is the reverence attached to Rev Frank Chikane; the unresolved political shadow of the PPE controversies of the Covid-19 period; and, now, the grotesque puzzle of how to weigh incumbency and experience against an obscenity hurled from the mayoral podium.

Either way, the choice has rarely made itself this easy. Johannesburg requires a candidate who can return the campaign to the question the ANC desperately wants voters to consider: what, after years of institutional exhaustion, is the movement still for?

The larger lesson is that leadership of society requires patience, discipline and the moral intelligence to distinguish wounded pride from threatened public authority. Democratic power is not vindicated when an office-bearer matches a citizen insult for insult; it is vindicated when those entrusted with authority can carry public anger without surrendering the dignity, restraint and accountability of office.

Johannesburg does not merely require a mayor who can survive the next electoral contest. It requires leadership capable of restoring administrative competence, public confidence and a shared belief that democratic institutions can still serve the common good.

For the ANC, therefore, the choice before it is not simply between personalities, factions or political liabilities. It is a test of whether renewal has acquired ethical content. A movement cannot credibly promise to rebuild the state while excusing conduct that diminishes the citizen. Renewal will remain an empty slogan until leadership under pressure becomes evidence of character rather than an exposure of its absence.

Johannesburg deserves no less — and South Africa’s democratic future can afford no lower standard.