It was Jim Collins who wrote famously about the theory of corporate decline in How the Mighty Fall (2009), the inverse of From Good to Great – Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, the blockbuster book published in 2001.
I was reminded of the lesser-known but equally insightful sequel by the announcement of Helen Zille’s candidacy for mayor of Johannesburg last week. It was a crystalising moment in the context of South Africa’s political development.
How the mighty fall
I believe Johannesburg and the country are deep in Stage 4 (Grasping for Salvation). Having for years believed that the 1994 miracle, the promise of a better future borne of a new democracy and an economic growth rate post-1999 that touched 5.4%, many began to take democracy and governance for granted. It was as if all we needed to succeed was to show up, an attitude that set in as quickly as a drug addiction.
Those of us who warned that the 2007 Polokwane National Conference of the ANC marked a turning point for the worse were derided as “grievers” or “clever blacks” and other pejoratives the ANC’s supporters dreamed up to justify its colossal mistake. In other words, the hubris was on steroids, accompanied by a spirited denial of risk and peril.
Every sector of society appeared to believe, without evidence, that somehow the Jacob Zuma years would see a continuation of South Africa’s upward trajectory. This wasn’t the case and was never going to be. Instead it was the beginning of a precipitous decline that has continued unabated since then.
Today the economy is a bowl of dust. We are now one of the world’s leaders in unemployment and its cousin, inequality. Despite trillions of investments over the years, much of which was wasted or stolen, national infrastructure is crumbling while critical institutions of state are on their knees due to the election and appointment of incompetent and inexperienced people to run them.
The collapse has now infested critical network infrastructure previously taken for granted, such as water. This is even in high-end suburbs like Bryanston and Hyde Park, in Johannesburg.
By the time the City of Johannesburg elected Kabelo Gwamanda as its mayor, the writing was long on the wall. It was an astonishing statement of political dysfunction and a masterclass in sustained, public self-destruction. As I write, Kenny Kunene of the Patriotic Alliance, who was found at the home of a high-profile criminal accused on the day of his arrest, is fighting to once again become the MMC for transport.
Dada Morero is the beleaguered mayor of the city, the fellow in whom so many have lost confidence, and the reason the apologist of colonialism and purveyor of alt-right talking points from Cape Town enters the milieu. The city is looking for a saviour, for salvation from the grip of incompetence and corruption that are choking the last breath out of its life.
Zille will be 75 going on 76 when the local government elections take place next year, making her possibly the oldest election-time mayoral candidate in South African history. She will also be a few months younger than Nelson Mandela was when he was the ANC’s presidential candidate in 1994 (he was 76).
On another day, there are viral tweets that show ANC ministers and MPs, usually women, who are ostensibly “too old” to still be in office”. To be clear, I agree we have too many old politicians and for South Africa to move on, younger, worldly, modernising and uniting leaders should step up and step forward. But it appears that this is more a reaction to the ANC’s failures than a principled position about a much-needed generational transition.
Zille’s candidacy is even more revealing when you consider that she is a resident of Cape Town and has not lived in Johannesburg for ages. In other words, just as Collins proposes in his book, Johannesburg is so incapable of rescuing itself it may well have to import a saviour – a classic Stage 4 response. As he says, in most cases, such importations fail, triggering the final stage, irrelevance and death.
It is not just Johannesburg that finds itself in the quagmire but the country. The current President was supposed to be the saviour as far back as 2018 when the ANC removed Zuma from office. The mood of national optimism has become a long, dark depression with no light at the end of the tunnel.
Has black leadership failed?
So that I am not misunderstood, I am NOT suggesting that black people are incapable of governing. They are capable. The first decade of democracy clearly demonstrates so. But if we are to hail the successes, we must also own the failures.
The question is also important in the context of the narrative of the African continent that has pleased many a colonial mind – that when we, black people, govern, we fail to build new institutions, sustainably transform existing ones and to strengthen them. It also says we steal, steal and steal again, with little or no care for millions of fellow Africans who continue to suffer.
Overturning this narrative and replacing it with a new, positive narrative of black role modelling is fundamental to how I think about politics and governing. This is why I will never be swayed by the call to black solidarity even when people are doing wrong things. We are supposed to have ethical standards, and these cannot be sold for a dime on the altar of racial solidarity.
That said, I don’t think we can honestly have the conversation about the failure of leadership without asking whether, after 31 years of democracy, what can be loosely called “black leadership” has failed. Even though our aspiration is to be a genuinely nonracial society, it is also true that in the public consciousness we have had a “black government” since 1994.
The state of the country and its municipalities is not, at this point, one of success. It is abject failure, with millions being stalked by poverty and hunger.
It is successive governments that have taken decisions that have proved harmful, or failed to act decisively and appropriately when such steps would have advanced the country. It was a choice to disband the Scorpions and allow corruption to become a culture. It was a choice to appoint idiots and thieves to the boards of state-owned companies, allocate them hundreds of billions in public funds and then do nothing while they were looted without much work being done.
This is what happens in democracies where there is degradation of the intellectual and ethical capacity of those who occupy the centre of political thought and power.
It is not the people’s fault that they are seriously entertaining the possibility of an alt-right, recycled politician from another province and city to run Johannesburg. The desperation is caused by a failure of political imagination and action by the black professional class which has long surrendered any commitment to wresting and retaining political power.
Yet, the same people want an economy that is thriving, inclusive and increasingly black-owned and driven. The most that some will do is to hang on to the coat-tails of ANC politicians in the hopes of getting deals, but who lack the commitment to develop and drive a modern version of progressive politics that do the same.
Until there is a growing sense of political ambition, despite their multiple degrees and professional occupations, they will continue to be governed by people who, even when they mean well, will run things into the ground. The belief that they could shield themselves from the effects of bad politics is misguided and entering their suburban homes in the form of water cuts, gaping potholes, uncut grass and brush and blocked drains.
Even worse, the cost of living is debilitating and will prove particularly harmful in the future. Instead of saving for the future, they pay for boreholes, solar power, private security, private fire services and super-expensive schooling because there aren’t enough good public schools. The list and the anxiety that comes with it are crushing.
What needs doing is not new. It has been done before.
Mandela and Oliver Tambo were attorneys, and so was Bram Fischer. Walter Sisulu had his own real estate firm. Sol T Plaatje was a journalist and linguist. Charlotte Maxeke had a bachelor of science degree from Wilberforce University, Ohio. Steve Biko was a medical student. I can write a list as long as my arm. The point is that political change has historically been driven by professionals, members of the much-derided “bourgeois class”.
In South Africa’s case, it was mostly black professionals who carried the bulk of the load, but had the ideological and ethical consciousness to know that we must build a nonracial society, and therefore having professionals of all hues was a historical necessity. This task has not changed and has instead become more urgent.
This is not to say there are no multiple-degreed people in the current political elites. There are many, but political ideas matter. Therefore, the point here is that there is a profound failure to articulate progressive politics and social justice in a way that responds to the age in which we live. For example, notions of the role of government in the political economy must, of necessity, evolve.
Speaking a language that demonises the very idea of business and everyone in it while hoping to grow the economy makes no sense. Democratic leadership in a market economy such as ours means using smart legislation, policymaking, regulation and taxation to ensure that the economy remains open, deconcentrated, diverse in its ownership and continually modernising.
It means making a choice between only speaking about land justice as a historical grievance, or a matter of spatial planning and justice – a reckoning with growing population size and rapid urbanisation that nevertheless make expropriation a practical necessity. It means understanding that “industrialisation” does not just mean old industries but building a powerful knowledge economy that produces practical solutions and technologies – which means an obsessive focus on achieving outsized education outcomes.
All of this and more, is not the task of the masses. It is the task of those the masses have toiled hard to produce, so that they may take the same masses forward to a prosperous future.
Back to Jim Collins
One of the abiding features of Stage 4 – Grasping for Salvation is the importation of a star CEO from outside the organisation in trouble. Amid much fanfare, bold promises and frenetic changes, they ultimately fail. Instead, data show that it is the insiders who know where the dead bodies are buried who sustainably rescue their organisations.
I believe that in the context of South African politics, to be frank, it ultimately must be a core of black leaders that emerges to take the country in a different direction. This is precisely why the DA tried and clearly gave up, to have a black leader. But of course, its project was always going to fail due to its superficiality, a desire to have the advantages of black phenotype without the necessary commitment to the idea of accepting that such leadership needs intellectual independence to navigate South Africa’s complex and nuanced social and political contours.
The choice
The DA has made a calculation that in the case of Johannesburg now, and the country in the future, “black” parties will once again be unable to put up candidates of substance, either for mayor or ward or PR councillors. They can make this summation with a degree of confidence because evidence shows that this is what tends to happen.
They are also counting on the continued paralysis of the black professional class, its dogged unwillingness to fight for political power off its own back. This, they believe they can count on with almost mathematical certainty.
But “success” will be temporary. Ultimately it will not be threats of applying brute force that get things done – but the ability to build credibility in a fractured political and electoral environment where no one has the majority. The politics of thinly veiled epithets and disrespect espoused by Zille aren’t how sustainable coalitions are built.
In the end, a worse outcome is likely, where the DA gets the biggest chunk of votes but fails to win a majority – and does not have the relationships to build a powerful coalition for action to improve Johannesburg and ultimately the country. Instead, we will have much more of the same or worse.
There is a special responsibility to build another option – one premised on a genuine desire to build bridges in a fractured environment, to have truly competent candidates with technocratic skills. For this to succeed, professionals, black professionals in particular, must develop an appetite for political power in their own hands, not those of proxies.
You cannot determine the direction of a country or city you are not willing to roll up your sleeves and fight for. As I wrote in the Sunday Times, the opportunity is not lost – but the window is closing fast. The peril that befalls Johannesburg because of this inaction will pale into insignificance compared with what happens to the country in 2029. DM