Cult of mediocrity

"We have displayed a consistent inclination since we assumed management of our affairs to opt for mediocrity and compromise, to pick a third and fourth eleven to play for us."

South Africa? No. The description by Chinua Achebe was of Nigeria, his homeland, published in the 1983 monograph The Trouble with Nigeria. Yet it is apt for South Africa in 2007.

This is no diatribe against equity and affirmation. It is a diatribe against the cult of mediocrity that we have come to accept from our leaders across the private, public and civil society sectors.

Between 1990 and 1994 we miraculously talked our way out of trouble, negotiated a path through minefields and constructed an imperfect but widely admired democracy.

A set of world-class leaders who thought laterally, fought from a position of principle and compromised tactically was assembled at Kempton Park, where the key political negotiations took place.

The trade unions brimmed with men and women who sculpted a labour law regime that is world-class (though in need of some real-world modification). They were able to think beyond their special interests; they also wrote and debated social and economic policies, many of which were adopted by the post-apartheid government.

The same quality of leadership was evident in our NGOs. Many leaders of that era took jobs in international bodies where they have made global strides for humanitarianism. The pickings in civil society are paper-thin nowadays.

And in the private sector, visionary leaders shaped wage agreements based on performance and productivity.

I wager that if our freedom was in the hands of the present crop of leaders we'd still be bickering at Kempton Park. We have picked "a third and fourth eleven" to play for us, to paraphrase Achebe.

Look at Parliament, where, until recently, the majority party was under the discipline of chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe.

It is sobering to think that the sex pest kicked out of the African National Congress (ANC) is the nephew of Matthew Goniwe, who gave his entire adult life to overthrowing apartheid and died a martyr at the age of 38.

Mbulelo is almost the same age. His political career died after he sexually harassed a young parliamentary aide of the kind his uncle would probably have mentored and empowered.

He did not rise to prominence by helping to make the ANC in Parliament a force to be reckoned with. Instead, he owned businesses he did not declare, used Parliament to shield himself from maintenance suits and tried to force ANC MPs to sign an oath of allegiance to President Thabo Mbeki.

It is an extreme example -- but the two men personify the qualities that helped usher in our democracy and the dross that we have now become used to.

There are notable exceptions, but the cream has not risen to the top in the new millennium.

Perhaps freedom has made us fat and complacent. Perhaps we are too much of an "Ag shame" nation, quick to forgive and overlook. Instead of a spur to action, freedom has become a comfort zone for leaders who have largely abrogated policy thinking to technocrats who model "solutions" on laptops. Of course, state management is a science, and a tough one.

Perhaps as the ANC starts its fourth term its elected leaders will become more comfortable and adept at power and display the qualities required to build democracy and foster development.

The affliction of mediocrity is also apparent in party leadership across the spectrum. Helen Zille has potential, but other DA leaders in the wings are still in political diapers.

Ditto the ANC Youth League and Young Communist League, whose deification of Jacob Zuma and anachronistic ideologies hamper the flowering of creative young leadership.

The ANC's Luthuli House headquarters is mediocrity city, headed by the underwhelming Kgalema Motlanthe and spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, who last year seriously told South Africans there was no battle over the leadership of the ANC.

And what of the trade unions, who have birthed some of South Africa's best leaders? Last year, Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi threatened that if new charges were brought against Zuma he would take workers on to the streets. Such intellectual paucity and disrespect for democratic institutions is widespread in these crucial movements of the working class.

Many of the world-class political representatives who remain will exit the stage come the election in 2009.

Thabo Mbeki will go -- a great politician, though one who has helped usher the country and his party into the culture of the so-so.

Goniwe, it must be remembered, was Mbeki's choice. So is our team of premiers who, but for Gauteng's Mbhazima Shilowa, are uniformly unimpressive. Mbeki has not punished mediocrity, as the fortunes of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri illustrate.

In a sea of mediocrity, good leaders come to be viewed as excellent, often making them complacent. Trevor Manuel is a fine finance minister, a clever politician and an orator in several languages, as his annual budget performance shows. But he can also be intolerant, arrogant and plain hardegat -- and the adoring plaudits do not encourage him to mend his ways. Likewise, Tito Mboweni is the country's best-ever central bank governor but a vain and impatient man.

2007 offers us a chance to raise the bar. It's the year in which the ANC will choose a new president, a moment which could have a domino effect on leadership throughout the country.

There is much at issue. As Achebe argued prophetically more than 20 years ago, "the cult of mediocrity will bring the wheels of modernisation grinding to a halt throughout the land".
Read more

The Other Genocide

Because Iraq is dominating international headlines, there wasn’t much response to an African story that Zimbabwan President Robert Mugabe arrested 20,000 miners as a prelude to taking over the nation’s gold mines.

Mugabe has already nationalized agriculture and almost every other industry in the nation. The results have been what always follows state collectivization — starvation and despair.

Millions have died due to the government’s policies and untold numbers of others have been brutalized or killed by Mugabe’s secret police.

According to Australian reporter R. W. Johnson, "A vast human cull is under way in Zimbabwe, and the majority of deaths are the result of government policies. Ignored by the U.N., it is a genocide 10 times greater than Darfur and more than twice as large as Rwanda’s."

Simply put, the population of Zimbabwe should be about 18 million, but social scientists estimate only 8 to 11 million people remain in the country. Millions have fled. Others have died of malnutrition or have been executed.

A few items in Mr. Johnson’s story are chilling:

n More than 42,000 women died in childbirth last year. A decade ago, the number was less than 1,000.

n So many babies have been dumped in the bush that hyenas have acquired a taste for human flesh.

However, Mugabe has a friend in South African President Thabo Mbeki, who has deftly kept the topic of the Zimbabwan atrocities off the U.N. table.

According to Mr. Johnson, the two heads of state, "have been responsible for more deaths than Rwanda suffered and the number is fast heading into realms previously explored only by Stalin, Mao and Adolf Eichmann."

Not to worry though. Amnesty International and other human rights groups plan to protest and demonstrate this month demanding that … the prison at Guantanamo Bay be closed.
Read more

Bright hopes betrayed

News that the Serious Fraud Office is investigating allegations of substantial payments to a senior advisor to South Africa's defence minister at the time of a massive arms deal comes as no surprise to those of us who have been asking questions about the transaction for years. Nor should it come as a surprise that the UK government is intimately involved in the dubious transaction.

The deal, and the allegations of high-level corruption associated with it, continues to bedevil South African politics six years after the contracts were signed.

The ANC government was initially heavily criticised for agreeing to spend £5bn on arms at a time when, fuelled by Thabo Mbeki's Aids denialism, it claimed to be unable to afford the provision of anti-retrovirals and other essential drugs to the millions of South Africans living with HIV and Aids.

In 2001, President Mbeki and the ANC leadership went to great lengths to neuter an investigation into the deal that myself and other MPs on the South African parliament's public accounts committee had initiated. Mbeki, deputy president Jacob Zuma and a host of cabinet ministers repeatedly denied that there was any corruption in the deal.

Since then, Tony Yengeni, the ANC's chief whip at the time and former chairperson of parliament's defence committee, has been sentenced to four years in prison for accepting a massive discount on a luxury car from one of the successful bidders and lying to parliament about it. The financial advisor to the then deputy president is serving 15 years in prison for corruption and fraud. Among other charges, the court found that a French arms company, Thomsons CSF (now known as Thales), agreed to pay the deputy president 0.5m rand a year to ensure their role in the deal was not investigated. Jacob Zuma, who remains deputy president of the ANC, was charged with corruption but the case was struck from the roll late last year. It is possible that he will be re-charged in May of this year.

As revealed by Der Spiegel recently, German investigators in Düsseldorf are investigating allegations of $25m-worth of bribes paid to South African politicians, officials and middlemen by Thyssen, another beneficiary of the arms deal.

The deal has taken centre stage in the divisive succession battle currently raging inside the ANC. Allies of Thabo Mbeki - who constitutionally cannot seek a third term, but is rumoured to be considering changing the constitution, or at least ensuring his chosen candidate succeeds him - point to the action against Zuma and his advisor as evidence of his commitment to fighting corruption. Zuma's supporters, in turn, suggest that the corruption trial, and an earlier rape trial in which Zuma was found not guilty, have been manufactured to prevent their man from succeeding his foe, Mbeki.

In court papers responding to the corruption charges, Zuma's lawyers suggested that they would, in all likelihood, have to call President Mbeki as a witness, suggesting that he is the only person able to pronounce on whether the arms deal was corrupt or not. Zuma may judge that Mbeki, who chaired the cabinet committee that made the final decisions on the deal and who was involved in discussions with a number of the ultimately successful bidders, will be reluctant to take the stand.

While investigating the deal, I never heard allegations that Mbeki himself benefited from the deal, but was told by a senior ANC leader and other sources that the ANC had received money from the successful bidders, possibly to fund its 1999 election effort. This has never been proved or disproved.

BAE Systems has admitted that they had made a payment of R5m to the ANC-aligned MK Veterans' Association while they were bidding for the contract. Of this donation, BAE has said: "It demonstrates that we wish to be good corporate citizens doing business in South Africa." The defence minister at the time, Joe Modise, was life president of the association, and I did hear from a number of sources that he had personally benefited inappropriately.

It is hardly surprising that BAE's role is under further scrutiny. The allegations of their paying massive bribes to Saudi royals in relation to the al-Yamamah arms deal have hardly dissipated after the UK government's shameful intervention to close down the SFO's investigation just as major breakthroughs might be achieved.

The UK government is similarly entwined in the South African deal. Tony Blair took the highly unusual step of signing a memorandum of understanding with President Mbeki endorsing the deal and its economic benefits. This came after the most dubious decision of the deal was made in favour of BAE Systems. The South African Air Force had plumped for an Italian jet fighter as technically superior to, and half the price of, the equivalent BAE/Saab offering. The decision-making body then took the extraordinary decision to remove cost as a criterion (in the country's largest ever procurement). Following this ruling, the BAE jet beat its favoured rival.

Tony Blair's role as BAE's premier salesperson, along with the loans for peerages scandal and the on-going Iraq debacle, is emblematic of just how badly the new Labour project has been tarnished since those heady days of 1997. Similarly, as 2006 ended, a divided and weakened ANC found itself mired in allegations of senior figures benefiting inappropriately from government-linked business deals. In addition, during the year, at least six senior ANC leaders were charged with sexual harassment, including the chief whip who succeeded the disgraced Tony Yengeni. (He has now been dismissed from his post and expelled from the ANC.)

How far this seems from that momentous day in 1994 when the world watched the incomparable Nelson Mandela inaugurated as South Africa's first democratic President. As investigators here, and in Germany, continue their endeavours, we can only hope that Tony Blair and Thabo Mbeki don't attempt to prevent the real facts emerging.
Read more