The case to answer is one of ineffective leadership

There is a discernible leadership crisis creeping upon our society. At the moment, the crisis manifests itself in a number of ways, chief among which are the following: the amount of ordinary people who have neither understanding nor personal experience of effective leadership; the amount of historically privileged people who think leadership is merely about opportunistic competence; the amount of previously disadvantaged people who think leadership is only about simplistic legitimacy; the poor performance of our education system – historically and currently – as well as the high levels of self-centredness and lawlessness.

Many people in our society and throughout the world honour Nelson Mandela`s leadership brilliance without necessarily understanding it or making an effort to learn where it derived its effectiveness from. They think Mandela became a great leader when he was released from prison, when he was elected as president of the country or when he was inaugurated as such. They do not realize that Nelson Mandela became a great leader based on the many risky and painful personal decisions he took during crucial moments in his life. Those moments include leaving his own mother to suffer in his absence when he was fighting apartheid, even though he knew he was her only son; starting negotiations with his jailers when he knew many consensus-minded comrades in his organisation disagreed with him. He also, very importantly, demonstrated the greatness of his leadership model when he worked hard, during very uncertain times, to convince his constituency to allow our rugby to retain the springbok emblem.

It is against this backdrop of clearly inimitable leadership performance that we have to contemplate how we are going to find or produce our new leaders. Fortunately for us, the grandest challenge confronting the post-apartheid South African society in the current epoch is not to try and produce another Nelson Mandela for another classic David and Goliath narrative. That is mainly because our current area of engagement is not an area in which an individual or a small group of individuals can win the prize on behalf of millions of people. Our current area of operation requires every individual to be meaningfully engaged in their personal capacity in order for both the individual and the collective to make the requisite progress. Sadly, though, it is an area in which many other societies across the world, which also had great founding fathers as in the case of South Africa, still went on to fail afterwards.

Our current efforts have to be focused on trying to develop enough willing and effective leaders who can mentor people both young and old. We need to produce enough willing and effective leaders capable of designing and implementing innovative strategies to address the behavioural and technical learning needs of millions of ordinary people in order to help them defeat their various forms of poverty. Contrary to what many people believe, the fundamental cause of the endemic suffering in the new-order South African society is something other than the purported failure of democratic governments to provide service delivery.

The endemic suffering has resulted primarily from successive oppressive governments, with the connivance of powerful private capital organisations, taking active steps, over decades and centuries, to prevent the majority of people in our society from discovering and embracing self-driven life-long learning as the most dynamic and sustainable way to create value and live human life. The purposeful exclusion of the majority of citizens was so that they could not become competent and compete for opportunities and resources in the open market against people favoured by the establishment. The poverty or disempowerment resulting from the exclusion is of two main types: material poverty and psychological or mental poverty.

Different forms of discrimination or disempowerment will always come and go among humans. But a form of discrimination that is likely to endure is discrimination on the basis of learning, meaning the good that one knows, understands and can put into practice. Simply put, that means discrimination on the basis of competence or skilled knowledge. And it must be noted here that discrimination on the basis of competence or skilled knowledge is recognized by societies as a legitimate – legally and morally – form of discrimination. This is despite the fact that many developing countries, including South Africa, are scarcely able to provide decent education to half of their populations.

Admittedly, there are many things that need to be done to rid our society of the scourge of unnecessary discrimination, and many of them are already being done with varying degrees of progress. But the most durable insurance against needless yet destructive discrimination is learning. Learning ensures that one is able to knowledgeably steer one`s own life, one cannot be locked out of debates one has interest in and, most importantly, one cannot be forced to revert to mob-inspired destructive behaviours to win battles and prizes, hoping that the mobs one operates within will cover for individual failings forever. Indeed some people in our society go on to suffer for the rest of their lives for deeds they commit in the seductive comfort of mob security, like when they are denied economic opportunities later in their lives because of crimes against their names.

Whereas it is true that the notorious trio of self-interest, incompetence and lawlessness within our society make achieving our national developmental goals extremely difficult, it is critical that we do not lose sight of the fact that our most realistic opportunity is holistic people development in order to ensure that people learn to do things for themselves. The pathologies of self-interest, incompetence and lawlessness are known to thrive in conditions where learning levels are low and the majority of people have neither skill nor confidence to demand accountability. It is my firm belief that no government or political party anywhere in the world can deal successfully with developmental issues on the scale demanded by the post-apartheid South African situation without genuinely returning the power of people development and talent management to the centre stage.

What we need as a society to avoid total failure and collapse is neither a new government nor a new political party. What we need is a leadership pact or contract with our citizens to move positive human energy and ingenuity to the fore. We need to have a contract with our people, which will allow us to unleash the potential of the majority of ordinary people to serve as our engine of growth and development. What we need is to produce leaders, mentors and role models to assist ordinary people to forge or buy into a spirit of wanting to do the most with the least by embracing the concepts of self-leadership and mentorship. Currently, our society is on a trajectory that spends too much to produce too little, depleting irreplaceable resources in the process. Old and young people, even those in privileged circumstances, do very little strategic learning and succumb to destructive behaviours, which does nothing to move them closer to realizing their dreams or taking Nelson Mandela`s dream forward through their talents. Robust people development programmes will make it easier even for our government to perform two of its primary functions, namely to provide a supportive environment in the form of infrastructure and, very critically in our situation, to restore confidence in our society by protecting people against wanton self-centredness and lawlessness.

Oppression has always been about appropriation of resources and power. In our society it has been consistently enforced in two main ways: physical violence and deprivation of learning. Again fortunately for us, Nelson Mandela and his class have done plenty of good work to reduce spaces for physical violence as a means to enforce suffering upon people. However, reversing the high levels of incompetence, corruption and hubris, which resulted mainly from an officially sanctioned poor learning culture, is likely to prove to be a great challenge for many decades. Legalised oppression did not only deny the majority of people access to learning. It also provided poor learning to the minority, teaching many of them to worship technical or mechanical compliance methods, protecting them against fair competition and encouraging them to treat their fellow citizens as subhumans. On the other hand, it must also be emphasized that though education plays a very important role in the process of developing and exercising effective leadership, effective leadership is not merely a function education. Personal characteristics such as talent, effort, resourcefulness and moral fibre still play significant roles in determining the success of leadership interventions.

What needs to be made abundantly clear is that what keeps millions of ordinary people down in our society is not the type of high profile case that kept Mandela in jail for more than a quarter of a century and attracted enormous world attention. Ordinary people are kept down by a plethora of individual barriers and impediments, which are caused by a combination of apathy on the part of many ordinary people themselves and the self-serving tendencies of people in the corridors of power across the entire spectrum of our societal institutions. Indeed many ordinary people are held back by their own high levels of ignorance or indifference to learning as well as their exposure to dysfunctional forms of leadership as practiced by many people in control of opportunities and resources.

These realities, which affect ordinary people with devastating effect in their individual capacities, make it difficult for our society to unleash the potential of enough individuals to make the difference or progress we desperately need. It is the cumulative effect of these realities, in the long run, which will prove to have an even deadlier impact upon our society than the combination of both the armed struggle of the liberators and the total onslaught of the oppressors. Only learning-based self-leadership by ordinary people and their effective mentorship by competent patriots can provide ordinary people with the competence and independence they need to co-operate when they choose and compete when necessary. Competence and independence do not only give people the tools they need to make their much-needed contributions to God`s world. They also grant them the freedom to respond appropriately to other people`s behaviours, irrespective of whether those behaviours are meant to compliment or compartmentalize.

It is important to stress that leadership is not a human being, a position, an institution, power or resources. Leadership is a spirit. It is a spirit of wanting to co-operate willingly with other people to do positive work for the common good. It is a spirit characterised by significant levels of awareness, skills, courage and persistence or resilience. Most importantly, leadership is about caring for people. Caring for people starts with caring for oneself, based on a brand of leadership called self-leadership. Currently, among the greatest risks in our society is the reality that people both young and old have very little chances of finding and working with a leader who knows what they are doing and can positively influence their lives. We have not done sufficient effective leadership training historically and are still not tackling the matter with the decisiveness it requires.

Without effective leadership at all the right levels of our society, especially the community member and the worker levels, the debate in our society about economic empowerment or transformation will go on ad nauseam. But it will go on without doing anything concrete to avert the looming catastrophic intersection between the growing desperation of the downtrodden masses and the headstrong attitudes of the privileged. And the privileged will continue to pretend that the so-called trickle-down effects of the free market system will provide answers for our predicament. As this happens, the majority of ordinary people continue to derive little benefit for themselves from the new dispensation. They derive even less positive benefit for their families and derive the least possible benefit for their communities. We need to cultivate a robust culture of self-leadership and mentorship and we need to do it fast.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy