Almost a decade ago, while delivering a memorial lecture on Oliver Tambo, the ANC's longest-serving president, Joel Netshitenzhe, made the following observation: "A defective leadership not only holds back the attainment of national objectives. It also presents a difficult conundrum for the movement . [To] rationalise its bad choices, the ANC has to lower itself to embrace those defects of the leaders it has chosen as its own defects. Steadily, these defects of the individual leaders become, by default, the collective property of the organisation, its own blind spots and its subliminal attributes in the public imagination."..