The most persistent questions in my mind as I prepared for this weekend and this topic have been: Leadership renewal for what purpose? What do we understand about leadership renewal?

My view is that the post-1994 consensus has broken down in many ways and for different reasons. By this, I mean a consensus of the elite who, following the dawn of our democratic dispensation, ended up in Parliament, the government and business – across race, class and interest groups.

The strong sense of national purpose we shared in the first 10 years of democracy began to disintegrate just as the economy was growing consistently and at a decent pace (+4%), unemployment was coming down (21%), and we were in the phase of creating democratic institutions of accountability. 

Over time, law enforcement capacity was destroyed; Parliament was taught through sheer political bullying to toe the executive line. Then we saw a focused and persistent effort to remove from executive roles those who were deemed to be problematic to the new politics.

The outcome has been a weakening and delegitimisation of political institutions, political actors and especially the two arms of the state, the Government Executive in all three spheres of our system and Parliament. 

Such weakening is the reason that, year after year, the Auditor-General sounds the alarm about the poor state of governance in municipalities.

What we now understand to be “civil society”, at least in its prominent form, are professional non-profit organisations that, often, are not necessarily rooted in community activism, but in special interest activism – and litigation. 

The litigation becomes necessary when you have an unresponsive, venal political elite and the institutions they oversee. We used to have community rooted civil society before, but the crème de la crème thereof went off to Parliament, legislatures, government and municipalities.

Trade unions suffered pretty much the same fate. 

In addition to becoming ministers and parliamentarians who later duck and dive from the demands of their own former members, they have also discovered the benefits of worker pension funds that run into billions. 

Their members have realised that there is no logic in assuming that their former colleagues will look after their interests, not just as workers, but as hardworking families and communities that need integrated solutions. 

And so, Cosatu members in the Western Cape vote DA.

In business, the era of founder chief executives is long gone. 

We now have large companies that are run by hired managers who answer to boards, and fund managers who are more than a decade younger than me and mainly worry about their bonus structures. 

The young asset managers have no sense of national purpose whatsoever, and are hardly tolerant of what they see as useless excursions by chief executives who actually care about the implications of bad politics and political choices.

And so ordinary South Africans are not naïve. They know a scam when they see one – and so over 25 million of them don’t vote because they do not trust the elites as an ecosystem. 

Instead, those who are sufficiently desperate and activated, resort to violence to attract the attention of elites.

These are not only growing in number but scale – and will continue to do so.

I want to suggest that we do not persist with a 1994 consensus when a new one is clearly needed.

This gathering is conceived as a gathering of diverse elites on the assumption that we will later reach out to one another and make such decisions as may be necessary to develop and grow an inclusive economy in coordinated fashion. 

That economy must create jobs – but we must be honest, many of us will do no such thing. And the people will notice, once more.

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This is dangerous for two reasons. 

First, we will have another version of the July 2021 riots. They will be bigger, more widespread and more difficult to put down. That is what you get when so many are unemployed, and the part of the government closest to them – municipalities – has collapsed. 

Second, we have a higher-than-before likelihood of a coalition government in 2024, and it will be put together in a manner that causes dislocations at provincial and local level as existing coalitions are re-examined and re-arranged.

So far, as weakened as it is, the ANC is still the anchor of much of that deal-making because it runs national government. 

All of us here, in some form or another, look to and reach out to government for direction because it is in power.

Who will you call after the 2024 elections? 

Or the hope is, a solution will emerge, somehow? If that is the approach, are any of us worthy of the strategic positions we hold in different spheres of South African society?

In closing, I want to suggest five things we must do to achieve long-term renewal.

First, we need to honestly introspect and be prepared to get into nose-breaking arguments with one another about the entire 1994 edifice we continue to nurse in ICU. 

I think it is time to let it go and build a new one, premised on the understanding that we need to reset our national purpose in a context where the ANC is no longer the centre of society’s attention. 

In its place will be a collection of parties that may or may not include it – and where direction is difficult to determine.

Second, this country needs another round of political reforms. 

In this respect, it is not just the electoral system we need to change. Instead, we must seek deliberately to shift more power to ordinary people so their representatives do not position themselves as leaders but as servants, or they will get fired regardless of what their party bosses think.

We need to re-examine the extent of executive power relative to parliament. 

We are where we are partly because the executive can do much of what it pleases, and bully Parliament into submission on the pain of political exile. That is how we broke SOEs and other agencies, but continue to talk about a “developmental state”. 

Third, we need to engage seriously with the question of what a new pact looks like – one that consciously seeks to include the people we assume do not need to be in conversations like this one. 

We cannot continue to talk about people without them in the room and expect decisions to be legitimate. 

Fourth, we must pursue overarching state reform and be prepared to purge the rogue elements who are in unelected positions but are otherwise a direct consequence of the general political decay we know we suffer from. 

They continue to make bad decisions premised on bad assumptions and driven by bad faith. 

Institutions matter. Good institutions matter even more – and we must be careful to not persist with broken systems and institutions for the sake of peace. We have no time to waste.

Fifth, and finally, we must get the abstract right, so the practical is able to pivot without losing its sense of purpose. 

We need to determine what our true social and moral contract is. 

The exchange of favours and interests that characterises our existing modes of engagement will not move the needle. 

It becomes the basis upon which we pursue our different interests without pulling in opposite directions. It does not mean we will not disagree, but we will do so arguing about execution, not principle. 

Such is not achieved by happenstance, but is an intellectual and moral task we leave to no one in particular. That is a dereliction of national duty.

Our Constitution and the toil and blood of our founding fathers and mothers demand we do so – or else we should get out of the way. DM/MC

Songezo Zibi is the Chairman of the Rivonia Circle. This is an edited version of his speech at the Drakensburg Inclusive Growth Forum hosted by the  Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation.