Excellence in political leadership cannot be defined as successfully evading legal culpability. That, unfortunately, is the ANC’s idea of leadership excellence.
If you have not been found guilty of a crime, then all is well. This is balderdash. We as citizens must demand a different set of criteria for what counts as leadership excellence in public office.
Reducing political and ethical leadership to legal norms is wrong-headed. Not being a criminal is necessary but insufficient for political leadership. But once we add to the criteria for political leadership excellence, we will have to come to terms with the brutal truth that ours is a government bereft of such.
An example of this low bar for political leadership is President Cyril Ramaphosa’s excitement that a court of law had found him to not be legally liable for the 2012 Marikana massacre. Or rather, at least insofar as the case brought against him by survivors has been formulated embarrassingly vaguely, and therefore in law not constituting a case to answer to (for now). But if you examine the email exchanges in 2012 between then director of Lonmin, one Mr Cyril Ramaphosa, and his colleagues, there are non-legal issues that cry out for interrogation.
Judge Frits van Oosten usefully quotes at length from the email communications, and the following email from Ramaphosa to his Lonmin colleagues, who were unhappy with the government characterising the crisis at Lonmin as a labour dispute, is instructive.
Ramaphosa wrote: “The terrible events that have unfolded cannot be described as a labour dispute. They are plainly dastardly criminal and must be characterised as such. In line with this characterisation there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation. You are absolutely correct in insisting that the Minister and indeed all government officials need to understand that we are essentially dealing with a criminal act. I have said as much to the minister of safety and security. I will stress that minister Shabangu should have a discussion with Roger.”
The court describes what happened next: “At 14h58, in an email addressed to all involved in the communication, Mr Ramaphosa mentioned that he had had a discussion with Minister Susan Shabangu in Cape Town and added:
“1. She agrees that what we are going through is not a labour dispute but a criminal act. She will correct her characterisation of what we are experiencing.
“2. She is going into Cabinet and will brief the President as well and get the Minister of Police, Nathi Mthetwa to act in a more pointed way.
“3. She will be in Johannesburg by 5pm and would be able to speak to Roger.”
These emails (between Ramaphosa and Lonmin management) reveal a Ramphosa that had become statist and wholly committed to capitalism. The emails demonstrate a patent lack of corporate ethics and political acumen. It does not matter what the law says. Ramaphosa comes out ethically and politically compromised on a plain reading of these emails.
It is obvious there are ethical and political issues here that cannot be fused with questions of strict legal liability or notions of legal causation. First, any corporate leader in a country with deep levels of wage inequality, and a sense of economic justice, ought to be profoundly moved by the inherent volatility of workers within the extractive industries.
In SA in particular, the mines were colonial and apartheid sites of oppression against black people, using black male bodies as inputs that go into the creation of wealth for a white minority.
These emails written by Ramaphosa show zero regard for the lack of economic democracy within the extractive industries. The emails show him to be callously indifferent to the inescapable moral truth that labour markets cannot settle questions of fairness.
In fact, Ramaphosa does not even see the workers in these emails; he simply robotically follows up on the concerns of his fellow Lonmin executives and leaders that the black bodies need to be neutralised as a criminal threat to the country. Where is the servant leadership Ramaphosa was renowned for in the 1980s? Where is the proof in these emails of a trade union instinct? Where in these emails do we see an ANC leader deeply committed to the plight of the working poor?
These emails reveal a Ramaphosa who had become statist and wholly committed to capitalism. The emails demonstrate a patent lack of corporate ethics and political acumen. It does not matter what the law says. Ramaphosa comes out ethically and politically compromised on a plain reading of these emails. The press statement this past week that gloats about the judgment seemingly letting Ramaphosa off the legal hook misses the point of leadership. Leadership excellence is about much more than not being found legally wanting.
Ramaphosa, like most members of his government, has no ability to crack our myriad crises and to move the country from trite diagnosis to actual stability. This is not just true of the Lonmin example that Ramaphosa wrongly thinks falls in his favour. It is as true of the government that he fails to lead successfully.
I could not bear the thought of watching wall-to-wall media coverage of this government flying out to the Eastern Cape for the mass funeral of the teenagers who died at an East London tavern, Enyobeni.
It was impossible to miss the finger-wagging at parents and the predictable promise that the law will be enforced against all tavern owners henceforth. This is how shameless this lot has become. Instead of recognising how much of an indictment it is that our children in townships find little else to do than to be entertained at outlets run by unscrupulous business owners, they pretend the full explanation for a tragedy of this sort is to be found in bad parenting and naughty lawbreaking businesses.
The more elementary truth is that laws, throughout our country, are routinely broken because law enforcement agencies are themselves morally compromised and hollowed out as a result of state capture. You can only self-examine your leadership failures as a government if you recognise that leadership is not only about avoiding being found guilty of a crime in a court of law.
What happened at the Enyobeni tavern leaves a stain on all of us collectively. Government is not exempt. But there was no political and moral leadership on display in how our “leaders” responded. ANC politicians simply rush to the scene, weaponise the tears of broken families and communities ruptured by tragedy, and then fly back to the state troughs to continue eating. This while economic indices about poverty, unemployment and inequality remain unchanged.
The ANC should renew itself so that a new kind of leader within can emerge, one that is focused on ethical leadership, and servant leadership, rather than evading criminal sanction only. However, the only chance of the ANC “renewing” itself is outside the state. This means if you love the ANC and want it to reproduce itself, healthily, then you ought to vote it out of power so it can work on itself without the pressure of running a ruined state.
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