MAKHUDU SEFARA | As long as we accept poor leadership, SA will drop the baton

We have as a people gone through a lot of pain and disappointments. Often, we blame politicians, with good reason, for goals that remain unachieved. 

Other times, we are responsible, even if we fail to acknowledge it, for the wasteland of shattered dreams that lies in our wake.

Take Thursday’s poor showing by our 4x100m relay team. About 200m in, they failed to do the handover with calamitous consequences. They finished second last. It wasn’t so much that they crashed out, it was that their exit from the Olympics confirmed our worst fears: that which glitters isn’t always gold. We hoped Akani Simbine would bring gold. We prayed Wayde van Niekerk would surprise us with another new world record. In the days ahead of the showpiece, we hoped Caster Semenya would qualify. In short, we relied on individual brilliance rather than the methodical preparation of an entire team, from whom medals could come.

That we sometimes look like world beaters doesn’t make us world beaters. In Rugby, oh bless those boys, they do their best, even as Rassie Erasmus courts world rugby bosses’ attention because they’re too sensitive to criticism. 

But the point is that we should not be surprised by how we crashed out of the Olympics. The clues have been there for a while. Look at the shambles that is the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc). Apart from what sadly has become normal sport politics, there were insufficient funds to help athletes prepare for the Olympics. And this is a chronic problem. But therein lies our main problem. Not Olympic-sort problems, but national challenges that lead to much of our pain and disappointment. We knew four years ago that Sascoc was a mess and the Olympics were coming. We left it to mainly the same people who wrecked it to fix it. There was no basis to believe they’d fix it, but, we lived in hope. 

We know now that the South African Football Association is run by people who have failed to achieve, on the field, anything of significance in the last 20 years. We are just hoping Danny Jordaan and his sidekicks will retire, or be employed at CAF by chairperson Patrice Motsepe so we can get a fresh start. When the nation was up in arms after yet another disappointment as Bafana Bafana failed to qualify for the World Cup and Africa Nations Cup, because the boys could hardly string together a few passes that suggested logic or intention to score, Safa simply fired the coach, Molefi Ntseki. And, like sheep, we were silent — until the next disappointment, as if we believed that simply changing a national coach would solve the complex issues stunting our soccer development. Many talented youngsters in our villages and townships remain undiscovered because Safa is eternally broke. And that is because the bright sparks at Safa shine only to deceive. They mask dysfunction.

We relied on individual brilliance rather than a methodical preparation of an entire team from whom medals could come.

The less said of Cricket SA with its unending list of challenges and disappointments, the latest of which is carping racism, the better. 

But at the heart of all these challenges is the problem of leadership. And we remain saddled with poor leadership because we, the people, don’t pay attention to the things that matter. We express our disappointments when we see other nations succeed, where we are exposed for the mediocre show of talent we are. 

The same cancer we see in the poor leadership of our sport teams is also evident in other areas of our national life. In politics, we, the people, can be so insulted with poor quality candidates for parliament and municipal councils, because political parties know we don’t pay attention and, even if we noticed, we are not inclined to sustain our public airing of disapproval. 

John C Maxwell says that “growth stops when you lose the tension between where you are and where you could be”. Put differently, we, the people, don’t worry sufficiently about what future we could achieve if we developed new routines, new habits. In fact, there is a whole theory — Intentional Change Theory — which focuses on how people assess themselves, ponder their future selves and then not only take action to transform their lives, but also figure out how to maintain the transformed self. 

That, I posit, is what we need to do at a national level if we want to fair any better at the next Olympics, or in the next soccer and cricket competitions. 

In fact, if we want quality leadership across the board, we need a citizenry that doesn’t “lose the tension” between where we are and the global beaters we ought to be.

The secret to how we will save ourselves from lurching from one psychological trauma to another, is if we are intentional about changing our routines. We may be lucky, from time to time, and achieve things that make us feel good about ourselves. These never last. They just fleetingly help us realise how good it feels to succeed. A window to our potential future self.

But to be true champions, we just can’t hope and pray. Well, prayer is a great thing, but it must be accompanied by development programmes, manned by skilled personnel, not merely people approved on the basis of familial or friendly relations. We must, collectively, worry about our mediocrity and the potential success and develop healthy habits to sustain our path to the top.

It will be long and arduous, but worth all the trouble. Tatjana Schoenmaker did great winning that gold. She should not be a lone star in a sea of pain and disappointment. She should be part of a 1,000 flowers blooming in our rainbow nation.