In The Shadow of Mandela

Political Leadership in South Africa

Alexander Johnston

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780755636822
• eBook ISBN: 9781788317696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

This outstanding and original work goes to the heart of South Africa's political problems - doubts as to the sustainability of the post-apartheid settlement, beset with divisions in the ruling ANC, factionalism, corruption and the widening of fault-lines in state and society. The 'leadership issue' has become key and this will be the first specific examination of leadership in the light of Mandela's legacy and its effect on his successor as potential and actual leaders - all in 'the shadow of Mandela' as the architect of the transition from apartheid to democracy, and with overarching moral authority and international reputation. Alexander Johnston shows how his successors are judged against Mandela's achievements, including the potentially impressive 'lost' leaders and concentrating on his immediate successors, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. The book concludes with an in-depth assessment of new president Cyril Ramaphosa's potential to be a leader for a 'new dawn'. This is an objective and critical work by a close observer who acknowledges the achievement of South African leadership but is acutely aware of the doubts as to the sustainability of South Africa's hard won democratic settlement. An essential read for all readers interested in leadership and in the traumatic history and future of Africa's leading state, as the continent rises to global importance.

Part One

Leadership and post-apartheid politics

Introduction: Political leadership in post-apartheid South Africa: From the sublime to the ridiculous

When South Africans went to the polls in May 2019, it was a quarter of a century and five democratic elections since the first one in 1994. This is a considerable slice of time – five years more, for instance, than the gap between the First and Second World Wars. More pertinently, in 2019, South Africa has been a democracy for over 60 per cent of the number of years of apartheid rule, that is, between the National Party coming to power in 1948 and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. In short, South Africa now has a considerable democratic history, ripe for assessment in weightier terms than the more tentative interim reports, including those produced by the presidency,¹ that have appeared at five- and ten-year intervals to date. The question is what to choose to bind the subject matter together and make it interesting for readers.

One possibility is to interpret the post-apartheid period through the lens of political leadership. In a democracy with fixed terms for presidents and/or alternation of governments through the polls, history falls seductively into periods defined by incumbents, long or short depending on their electoral fortunes. In this way, it is hard to resist the logic that there was something distinctive about (especially) the Mandela years, the Mbeki project and the numerous and varied dramas of the Zuma years, and that what shaped this distinctiveness had a lot to do with the qualities, attributes and failings of the three individuals concerned.

We are in any case conditioned by both high and popular culture to understand the world in terms of a narrative arc or, more simply, storytelling. This is true of all societies. Thus, political leadership – especially where there are term limits – is subject to a narrative template. This consists of the following components: backstory and honeymoon; developing tensions and expenditure of credit; exhaustion and a lame-duck period as the term limit approaches; and usually, though not invariably, post-office rehabilitation (which is tentatively observable in current portrayals of Thabo Mbeki). South Africans of all political persuasions and at all levels of political discourse, from popular understanding to opinion making in the media to academic analysis, tend to put great weight on leaders and leadership as explanatory factors in politics. A typical recent example, an examination of the Zuma years, has it that:

We are a country in crisis; a country that by virtue of a leadership void and a state apparatus that has badly lost sight of the principles of ethics, integrity and honesty is losing traction fast.²

One of the purposes of this book will be to explore why South Africans think and talk about political leadership so much and to what effect as well as whether they are overinvested in the concept and if so with what political results.

In South Africa, in common with other countries, discussion of political leadership conventionally focuses on the occupants of the highest political offices. South Africa has had three presidents who have served at least one full term of office since the country’s first democratic election in 1994 and Ramaphosa, the fourth, is set to follow them.³ As the first, Nelson Mandela served only one of the two five-year terms as state president allowed him by the Constitution. Indeed, this period in office was in some respects an honorific postscript to the period between his release from twenty-seven years in prison in February 1990 and the 1994 election. During this time, he held no other position than president of the African National Congress (ANC), like the state presidency a five-year term but without limit under the party’s constitution as to how many terms could be served. Even this term came to him as a result of Oliver Tambo’s incapacity. Without formal legitimacy for the exercise of political power outside his own party until the 1994 election, he commanded little in the way of material resources. However, despite lacking most of the assets commonly at the disposal of political leaders, he was, more than any other person, combination of persons or organizations, responsible for keeping together not only the liberation movement he led but also the whole country, during a time of acute crisis.

The subsequent elevation of Mandela’s life story to heights of unprecedentedly reverential celebrity built on an image cultivated since his time in jail is a well-known story. This image contains elements as diverse as chairman of the board, tribal aristocrat and perhaps the greatest product ever of global celebrity culture – everybody’s friend on Facebook.

An essential element of all this has been to see Mandela in terms complementary to the ‘miracle’ of South Africa’s transition to democracy and to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s coinage, the ‘rainbow nation’. In popular parlance this is ‘Madiba magic’, and in more elevated terms a recent academic collection defines it in terms of ‘the politics of the sublime: something that transcends the structures, constraints and ordinariness of the present’.⁴ Writings about Mandela, whether by journalists, commentators, academics or people who have known him in one capacity or another (however fleetingly), are liberally scattered with words such as ‘bewitchment’, ‘rapture’, ‘infatuation’ and ‘enchantment’ as well as invocations of quasi-religious experience. ‘The politics of the sublime’ sums it up well.

John Carlin’s fevered take on white rugby supporters chanting Mandela’s name at the 1995 rugby world cup final is a case in point: ‘They were crying out for forgiveness and they were accepting his, and through him, black South Africa’s generous embrace.’⁵ Another one of the many to share the experience of coming under Mandela’s spell was the über-political strategist Stanley Greenberg. He felt that Mandela was so fundamental to everything he had done in his own career ‘that I was about to meet my maker’ and ‘I may have been working for Bill Clinton, the most powerful man in the world at that point, yet I still felt unworthy to be here as if I had not done enough to justify the meeting’.⁶

Yet ‘the politics of the sublime’ is the province not only of the humblebragger, the mystic and the star-struck. As tough-minded and critical an analyst as South African political scientist and historian Hermann Giliomee could join in agreement on Mandela’s magical powers with the late Van Zyl Slabbert, leader of the liberal opposition in ‘The Last White Parliament’: ‘Afrikaners were captivated by Mandela; he cast a spell that produced a state of charismatic bewilderment.’⁷

Since Mandela left office in 1999, South Africans have been brought down to earth from transcendence, enchantment and the politics of the sublime with many a bump. Thus, it is not only a cynic that might be tempted to think that the journey from Mandela to Zuma via Mbeki has been from the sublime to the ridiculous. On the face of it, it did not have to be like that. There was a wide open opportunity for a transformative leader in what for a period was dubbed ‘the New South Africa’. The challenges of dealing with the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, as well as of the bitter struggles against them, were huge. But the resources available to the country’s new leadership were substantial. They included repeat large majorities won fairly in open elections, conferring the mandate to preside over a new polity regulated by a widely acclaimed rights-based and justiciable constitution, at the head of a movement that had won broad-based respect for its tenacity and bravery in the anti-apartheid struggle and its shrewd and well-timed conversion to constitutional democracy.

Instead, the enchanted one left the stage early with scarcely a curtain call and in his absence the rest of the leadership cast shrank and froze in the icy glare of the challenges. The most obvious question raised by contemplation of leadership in post-apartheid South Africa is, ‘what went wrong?’

Perhaps part of the problem was simply that enchantment is a difficult act to follow. Perhaps South Africans (cheered on by the rest of the world) had binged on enchantment, and disenchantment was the inevitable hangover. Thanks to his proximity to the great man and perhaps to his own psychological vulnerability, Mbeki suffered more than Zuma from the ‘After Mandela’ syndrome: the endless editorializing from commentators – both resident and fly-in and most of them white – about whether South Africa could hold together after the icon’s retirement. The relentless drumbeat of speculation continued throughout the fourteen years between his leaving office and his death in 2013. As early as 1996, three years before Mbeki became president of the country as it became clear that the succession was his, the Mail and Guardian newspaper (despite its small circulation, a key opinion maker and then, as now, flagship publication of the liberal-left) ran a profile headlined ‘Is Thabo Mbeki fit to rule?’ with the avowed aim of ‘probing Mandela’s enigmatic heir’.⁸ In fact the piece, especially as reread today, was balanced and neither scaremongering nor muckraking: however, the headline was ill-chosen, a good indication of the reach and potency of the Mandela effect, especially we may presume, on his successors.

Mbeki has been portrayed by commentators and biographers in many ways: a kind of sagacious Afro-Saxon with his (pre-1994) tweed jacket, his pipe, his degree in development economics from Sussex University and his fluency in the Eng. Lit. classics; an intimidating intellectual who could cow his ANC peers with knowledge and powers of reasoning (admittedly the bar was not set high); a driven centralizer, intolerant of debate and shared decision making, never mind dissent; an aloof and distant technocrat, out of touch with ordinary people’s experiences and values; author of the ‘1996 class project’ and betrayer of the revolution and the working class to neo-liberalism; a thin-skinned and haunted figure, adrift in a post-imperial world and cursed by the residues of racism and colonialism that still shaped all around (and inside) him. Yet little of this seemed relevant in the aftermath of his fall, as a paper Caesar submitting meekly to an evanescent populist rabble.

Now that a decent interval has elapsed since Zuma’s alliance of insurgents ousted him from the leadership of the ANC in 2007 and then in the following year brought his second and final presidential term to a premature and ignominious end, a new generation of admirers has dubbed him ‘Africa’s philosopher king’.⁹ With so much to choose from, it is no wonder that so many would-be chroniclers, past and present, have from beginning to end chosen to hedge their bets and dub him, ‘an enigma’.

Zuma began by being seen (with only a few dissenters) as a charismatic populist, personally warm and jovial, rooted and comfortable in his own culture but inclusive and respectful of other’s ethnic roots; befriender of Afrikaners (especially poor ones who were no threat to him); a man who could be all things to the Left, to minorities, to ethnocultural traditionalists, above all, at the head of a coalition of those disaffected by one aspect or another of Mbeki’s trajectory in office.

All things considered, despite the dark residual clouds of his (successfully defended) rape trial and the matter of his outstanding corruption charges, Zuma received a mixed welcome to high leadership. This veered from the exuberance of the Left and populists (who thought they had captured him) to deep satisfaction from traditionalists who had felt marginalized and were alienated by the secular and metropolitan veneer of the new constitutional and social order and saw him as one of their own. On the debit side, the crude populism with which these supporters swept him into the leadership of the ANC gave rise to misgivings on the part of many who were not committed to his cause. However, with the benefit of hindsight, such misgivings as there were now seem surprisingly muted, at least as at first expressed.

The qualms were tempered in turn by wary optimism from many who were not his supporters. This was in large measure due to the calculation, even of sceptics, that here at least was someone better in tune with actually existing South Africa than Mbeki had been and, conceivably, as much in tune with what South Africa had become since 1994 as Mandela had been in his day. If South Africa had become cruder, more divided, demotic and volatile in the first dozen post-apartheid years, then perhaps someone with his down-to-earth profile would make a better job of managing its contradictions than Mandela the natural aristocrat or Mbeki the mandarin.

Zuma’s reputation as a negotiator and peacemaker did much to reinforce this cautiously positive image. In South Africa’s own negotiations, in Burundi’s civil war (while he was deputy president and Mbeki’s envoy), but above all in the KwaZulu-Natal violence between the Zulu traditionalist movement Inkatha and the ANC (and its surrogates), he was widely credited with the human qualities, cultural fluency and astute tactics useful in resolving conflicts, especially ones with ethnocultural dimensions.

However, the misgivings multiplied and intensified, slowly at first but quickening after the publication of the first of two reports by the Public Protector (at that time Thuli Madonsela) into improper and unethical behaviour by and on behalf of Zuma. This was in the matter of the use of public funds to enhance a private dwelling for the president (March 2014). With the second (November 2016), relating to cronyism and corruption in the running of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), disquiet had become public disaffection, spreading beyond the ranks of the opposition and civil society activists. By this time too, a critical mass of court judgements had gone against Zuma. Some cleared the way for reinstating corruption charges against him, which had been dropped under dubious legal and political conditions in April 2009. Others set aside appointments made by him to public bodies, appointments that owed much to cronyism and protecting Zuma and nothing to the public interest.

By mid-2016, Zuma cut an incongruous figure: a postcolonial African Big Man leader transplanted, as if by time travel, into a quite well-functioning and robust constitutional democracy. Protected by what is routinely described as a ‘praetorian guard’ of compromised appointments to head the criminal justice and security agencies, presiding over a bloated cabinet which contained far more than its fair share of incompetents and sycophants, surrounded by economic illiterates and partnered in what was increasingly revealed as a project of cronyism and state capture by a carpet-bagging family of businesspeople from the Indian subcontinent, Zuma seemed to personify the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous in South African leadership as he made the transition in the eyes of his critics from affable but ineffective dancing king to a pound-shop Bond villain in his taxpayer-funded lair in Nkandla.

He showed himself to have little respect for the constitutional order over which he presided, but despite his best efforts to subvert and dilute it he couldn’t choose the final ploy in the dictator’s playbook and overcome it. On the other hand, the various defenders of the constitutional order (by late 2016 some of them were in his own party) could frustrate him but not get rid of him. This is because whatever else Zuma may have lacked as a leader, it was not a grasp of bread and butter ANC politics. His command of this repertoire – effectively, dominating the provincial branch structures that are the building blocks of power in the party – was enough to provide him with a favourable balance of organizational power in the period leading up to the ANC elective conference of December 2017.

This grasp of party dynamics meant that despite leading the ANC to the unprecedented loss of three key metropolitan areas, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth) in the 2016 municipal elections, he had reason to believe himself able to determine the succession to him as ANC president or even to secure a third term for himself. Thus, the ANC approached its elective conference in a state of febrile gridlock: a leader beleaguered in the courts, pilloried in the media, hounded by demonstrations, potentially a serious electoral handicap for his party, yet strongly rooted in the state apparatus and party organization. The excruciatingly narrow victory of Cyril Ramaphosa over Zuma’s nominee, his ex-wife Nkosasana Dlamini-Zuma, and the subsequent ousting of Zuma in February 2018, which brought Ramaphosa’s elevation to the state presidency but clean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One Leadership and post-apartheid politics
• Part Two Leadership in the haunted present: Legacies and lost leaders
• Part Three Mbeki and Zuma
• Part Four Leadership in the altered future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page