The merger that fell victim to vanity and naivety

04 Feb 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Even before the shortest-lived union in SA’s political history was over, commentators were already suggesting that Mamphela Ramphele is the political equivalent of Zsa Zsa Gabor, writes Tony Leon

LAST WEDNESDAY evening, Cape Town’s Mount Nelson Hotel was the venue for the launch of a homage to the grand dame of South Africa’s old opposition, Helen Suzman.

Agang SA leader Mamphela Ramphele

And the past, present and future leaders of that project were gathered for the event: former president FW de Klerk, Inkatha boss Mangosuthu Buthelezi, this columnist, and the youngest leader of the parliamentary opposition, Lindiwe Mazibuko. But all eyes that night were on two of the speakers, Helen Zille and Mamphela Ramphele, whose political betrothal had been announced just the day before. Within days, they would breathe new life into the cliche, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure."

Robin Renwick’s concise and affectionately penned book, Helen Suzman — Bright Star in a Dark Chamber, relies more on anecdote and research than on critical analysis. The book and the launch speeches dwelt on one part of the Suzman story: the immense reserves of character and conspicuous displays of courage and wit of a parliamentary David, who went up against the Goliath of the apartheid order.

But it leaves unexamined the paradoxical simplicity of that difficult task. Suzman had principle and a righteous cause on her side. She was in opposition to a system that, while popular with white South Africans, was universally opposed by the black majority, much of civil society and most of the world.

In electoral terms, to continue her work, Suzman needed the support of just one constituency out of 166 in white South Africa — Houghton. As I discussed with her daughter, Frances Jowell, after the event, despite the fact that she was certainly the most famous member of her party, she never sought, and in fact resisted, the idea of ever becoming its leader.

As a conviction politician, Suzman’s work was relatively uncontaminated by the messy compromises of party management and the need to expand the base of her movement.

With South Africa’s attention riveted by the off-on-off parachute jump by Ramphele into the top slot of the Democratic Alliance, it is easy to forget quite how unenthusiastic Suzman was every time her beloved Progressive Party felt the need to merge and reinvent itself to meet the expectations of opposition voters, who, then as now, craved the unification of a fractured opposition and the injection of some political glamour to refresh the project.

Renwick’s book does not mention the hostility between Suzman and Harry Schwarz, leader of the Reform Party breakaway from the United Party, which resulted in the Progressive Reform Party, later the Progressive Federal Party. And when that formation had reached its electoral sell-by date, the Democratic Party (DP) was formed in 1989.

Renwick writes, appropriately for a diplomat of long and distinguished standing: "She did not take kindly to suggestions that, to try to widen its appeal, the new entity should try to shed the Progressive Party image of which she was understandably proud."

Actually, when the DP was formed with its ill-conceived troika leadership, she had a much earthier response: "This is the biggest hijack since Entebbe and there are no Jews around to rescue it." When the decision was taken in 2000 to merge the Democratic Party with the New National Party to create the Democratic Alliance, I was the recipient of Suzman’s incandescent fury. She reluctantly accepted the electoral logic of the arrangement, but told me, and then repeated in public, that it should have been a pact, not a full-scale merger. One can only speculate on her reaction to the events of last week.

On hearing the news of Ramphele’s accession into the DA, I thought it tactically smart but strategically questionable. It seemed to breathe excitement and enthusiasm into the opposition ranks.

In the long or even medium term, I thought it bequeathed the opposition with more problems than solutions to the quest for refreshed leadership and policy coherence. And then, even before the shortest-lived political union in South Africa’s political history was over, the controversies erupted. Across the board, commentators and insiders suggested that Ramphele was the political equivalent of Zsa Zsa Gabor. The latter was "famous for being famous", the former for high offices she had achieved rather than any significant achievement in them.

Then came Ramphele’s calamitous weekend interviews, in the Sunday Times and Rapport. In both, she presented herself as a narcissist on steroids. But Zille and the DA leadership had been led to and dropped at the altar by Ramphele once before.

It brings to mind the aphorism: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Surely the key issue was to tie down Ramphele in explicit terms to signing a DA membership form before the announcement? Without that, it’s like selling your home without confirming the price. On the one hand, a fatal combination of vanity and naivety. But, on the other, it is better to cut your losses than to double down on a huge mistake.

• Leon is the author of The Accidental Ambassador (Pan Macmillan). Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

‘Hinterland’ just the ticket in a leaderless world

15 Oct 2013 | Tony Leon  | Original Publication:  BDlive

Very few of the leaders on the global stage today have had much hinterland other than politics, writes Tony Leon

A LOCAL cynic noted the other day that while South Africa’s government functions for only about half the day, in recent weeks that is immeasurably better than watching the US government closed down for the whole day.

The capture of the US Republican Party by its take-no-prisoners Tea Party wing of true believers, who don’t believe as much in election results as they do in stripping President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms of funding, has provided an extraordinary spectacle. The old phrase, "crippled giant", has been given new meaning.

Not that the minority outliers in the House of Representatives should shoulder all blame. It has been a curious sight to watch the rhetorically impressive US president prove so feeble at what should be at the core of his job — doing the political business and forging the compromises to further his agenda.

The beetle-browed, 96-year-old British statesman Denis Healey had it right when he said every leader needed what he termed "hinterland". By this he meant being genuinely curious about the world around you and having a range of interests and a reach of ideas that draw on life outside your profession. This opens you to a world of inspiration to call on, which, far from crowding out your laser-like focus on your work, enhances it and inspires the decision-making process needed to enhance it.

Famously and balefully, Nelson Mandela fashioned much of his later political leadership from his prison experiences, enforced on him over 27 years. But it was also quite striking how often he referenced decision-making to experiences he gleaned in the unusual (in the sense it was the only black firm of its time) circumstances of the legal practice he established with Oliver Tambo in the 1950s. He certainly had hinterland.

Ronald Reagan built a hugely effective presidency because of his Hollywood background. This didn’t only allow him to become the "great communicator", but his clashes, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, with the powerful trade unions there gave him an essential idea about free markets to communicate as well.

Two of South Africa’s corporate leaders who grew family enterprises into global corporations were Harry Oppenheimer and Anton Rupert. They both had hinterlands in spades. Oppenheimer had spent a decade in opposition parliamentary politics and had a lifelong love of Africana. Rupert’s fascination with South African art and his love of his Karoo hinterland were not examples of corporate social responsibility — the concept had yet to be conceived and codified in his lifetime — but the consequence of real passion.

The contrast between those times and today’s leaders is quite striking. Very few of those on the global stage have had much hinterland other than politics. Obama was essentially a community organiser and a state legislator before serving two years in the Senate and running for the presidency. British Prime Minister David Cameron, born into affluence, aside from a brief spell in financial public relations, has spent his whole life in government and politics.

Locally, practically the entire Cabinet and the president have either spent a lifetime in politics or trade union work and have experienced little of the challenges of professional, nonpolitical activity. Of course the extraordinary circumstances of our history accounts for some of this — but not entirely. For example, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan is admired across the cacophonous divisions of our polity. But aside from a lifetime in "the struggle", he had also practised as a pharmacist. And before his appointment to the Cabinet, his leadership of the South African Revenue Service provided him with knowledge of the intricacies and challenges of business and the corporate world, which went beyond the theoretical.

The emerging new leadership on the opposition side is cut from a similar, politics-only cloth and few of them could claim too much hinterland either.

But hinterland alone is not enough for successful and consequential leadership, which can change country destiny or corporate fortune. I was reminded of this when I participated in a debate the other night with AgangSA leader Mamphela Ramphele. She is charming, erudite and certainly has a greater hinterland of experience than any other recent leader in this or most other countries. The policy positions she elaborated were sensible. But I am not sure that she moved much of the capacity audience in Cape Town that night.

The additional missing ingredient is to explain the "why" and not just the "what" and the "how": a belief in something that inspires followers to believe in it themselves. There’s a brilliant TED lecture on the subject by Simon Sinek. It lasts about 10 minutes and is free to download on YouTube. It provides more insights than most I have heard from an army of expensive management consultants and political strategists. Take a view.

• Leon is the author of The Accidental Ambassador (Pan Macmillan). Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

Odds are stacked against Ramphele’s new party

12 Feb 2013 | Tony Leon  | Original Publication:  Bdlive

Mamphela Ramphele would do well to visit her local cinema and view the epic Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln, writes Tony Leon

ARGENTINIAN writer Jorge Luis Borges memorably described the 1982 Falklands War between his country and the UK as "two bald men fighting over a comb". This is an apt metaphor for the court case of the Congress of the People (COPE) being fought between its founding leaders, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa; that is, to the extent anyone, other than a handful of its captive public representatives, cares about the outcome.

How different things seemed just more than four years ago, in November 2008, when COPE was launched in Sandton, cheered by thousands of enthused delegates and buoyed by huge media support. At the outset, it enjoyed the approbation of other opposition parties and paraded a deep bench of credible leaders (including, in time, South Africa’s former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka). The wind in its sails as it set course to chart new waters in South African politics was not simply filled with the normal political bombast. Objectively, here was the first serious and much-anticipated split in the African National Congress (ANC) since its legalisation in 1990 and its ascent to power four years later.

The fact that the party was revealed over time to be a grab-bag of political nomads, clinging to the wreckage of Thabo Mbeki’s vanquished presidency, was not apparent when South Africa went to the polls six months after COPE’s formation. The party, despite severe financial constraints, won a very creditable 7.3% of the vote, and its 1.3-million supporters secured it third place in the new Parliament. Its subsequent immolation, caused by leadership rivalries, an infirmity of tactics and its absence of a survival strategy, soon enough consigned COPE to the elephants’ graveyard of our politics.

This unquiet resting place, where so many other political formations lie just beneath the stony soil of our politics, provides us with examples of what it takes to found, lead and, crucially, sustain a political party in addition to South Africans’ hunger for a credible alternative to one-party domination.

Contrary to present beliefs and some of the gushing admiration from some media at the much-anticipated, much-delayed announcement of the political intentions of Mamphela Ramphele, there has never been a shortage of aspiring new opposition leaders in our country.

Back in 1997, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) elected Bishop Stanley Magoba as its president. His Robben Island years, leadership of the Methodist Church and leadership role in the National Peace Committee, on the surface, constituted all the right stuff to arrest the declining fortunes of his ailing party, which had an impressive struggle biography. Nice man that he was, he had zero effect on Parliament and the "slow puncture" of the PAC, in the sharp put-down of Jeremy Cronin, proceeded apace.

There was much expectation, in the same year, when the man who topped the polls in the election of the ANC’s national executive committee, Bantu Holomisa, was expelled from the party and founded the United Democratic Movement. Using his base in Transkei in the 1999 election, he secured 500,000 votes and 14 MPs for his party. In the intervening 15 years, however, Magoba and the PAC have disappeared from the political scene, while Holomisa remains today in Parliament bestride a rump of just three other MPs. His constituency has shrunk to a quarter of its original size.

As a citizen, I welcome the arrival on the political scene of a new political force in the form of Ramphele, especially in these fraught times. As a former leader of the opposition I know what it takes, however, to sustain such a movement. Irritated though she apparently is at me for offering gratuitous advice, I will bear the burden of her irritation by making one further suggestion.

She would do well to visit her local cinema and view the epic Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln. His ultimately successful effort to enact the 13th amendment to the US constitution, the prohibition of slavery, was purchased at considerable cost. That story, about the high-mindedness and low skullduggery of 19th-century US politics, applies in our own political realm 150 years later.

A heroic biography takes you only so far. You crucially need roots, a clear philosophy and, especially, a machine to deliver votes. You also have to undergo what I used to call the "chemotherapy of politics", the dirty business of fundraising. Every opposition leader has visited the house of Gupta or worse. Then there is what Colin Eglin called "long-haul politics" — the sheer ability to stick it out as an opposition politician, with a short gravy train and limited patronage. Often you have to build the foundations of future success without enough straw for the bricks to construct it. Being a political leader might feed one’s vanity in the initial phases, but, as former UK politician Matthew Parris observed, over time "it starves your self-respect".

Perhaps the latest political force in our land will defy these odds. Time will tell.

 • Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA

Local leaders at risk of failing Berlusconi test

30 Oct 2012 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: BDlive

We have advanced down the road where know-who rather than know-how is the price of admission to corporate riches, writes Tony Leon

ON FRIDAY, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s former prime minister, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for tax fraud. The more sensational of his trials — allegedly paying "Ruby the heart-stealer", an underage dancer, for sex and then abusing his position to secure her release — still lies ahead.

South Africans will be familiar with this trope: the lurid intersection of public office, abuse of position and problems with the taxman. Earlier this year, Berlusconi opined that "political credibility is like virginity — easy to lose, difficult to maintain and impossible to regain if lost".

A number of South African politicians — serving and aspiring — are currently in the dock of public opinion on issues of credibility. In the recessionary world, reputation management and how to repair damaged credibility is a growth industry, and in South Africa there is no shortage of clients.

First in the line-up is Cyril Ramaphosa, Lonmin director and a favoured deputy presidential candidate, according to some in the camp of President Jacob Zuma. The Prince Hamlet of the African National Congress is accused, based on e-mails he wrote to fellow Lonmin executives on the eve of the Marikana mine massacre, of being "complicit in mass murder". Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley did a suitable demolition job on the accusation and on advocate Dali Mpofu, who advanced it. He described this characterisation as "an absurd and slanderous lie". But it was a less sensational communication from Ramaphosa that compels attention and invites unease, even if in the tangled web of political influence-peddling by impeccably connected businessmen it causes little surprise.

In an e-mail to Lonmin chairman Roger Phillimore about the conduct and lack of action by Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu, Ramaphosa advises "we should have a discussion (with her) to see what she needs to do". The idea that a company director can tell a minister "what to do" underlines how far we have advanced down the road where "know-who" rather than "know-how" is the price of admission to corporate advancement and riches.

South Africa is perhaps an extreme example of this tendency but it hardly stands alone. Even in the US, where generally (see Mitt Romney) success in business is the prologue to political office and not the reverse, we have the case of Dick Cheney, the veritable Darth Vader of modern politics. Before he crossed to the "dark side" of approving waterboarding and other torture exotica as state policy when vice-president, he was CEO and chairman of energy giant Halliburton. But his appointment to corporate office was based entirely on his impeccable political connectivity, having served in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush and then for 20 years in Congress.

Next in the field of evolving local reputations is Mamphela Ramphele. An avatar of good governance, harsh critic of government corruption, apostle of transparency and, on some accounts, an aspiring political leader, she is also chairwoman of Gold Fields. The company is currently in the frame with a controversial black economic empowerment deal concerning one of South Africa’s richest mines, South Deep. Some dodgy characters and powerful politicians were included in this bonanza. Her somewhat lame response to a Financial Mail inquiry — "I was not part of the decision-making at the time" — might be technically true, but hardly inspires confidence about shouldering responsibility or sweeping out the Augean stables of the political influence-peddling of which, in other contexts, she loudly complains.

Finally we have Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. Of a dozen or so Cabinet ministers I shepherded around Argentina during my diplomatic stint there, he probably did most to advance South Africa’s international image. This was not because some of his colleagues underperformed during their visits. Rather, it was due to his credibility as a thoughtful steward of public finances. This proved to be sweet breath on the local air of Buenos Aires, weighed down by runaway government spending and high inflation.

In Parliament last week to present his medium-term budget policy statement, he promised to rein in government expenditure by, among other things, looking closely at the number of employees in the public sector, suggesting billions of rand could be saved by identifying "ghost and surplus workers".

His credibility test lies in making good on this promise. He needs to prove he doesn’t just sign the cheques but has the will and the power to obtain quos for the quids he dispenses. A good place for him to start would be South African Airways, for which he recently provided a further R5bn bail-out. He would do well to look up the website Avcom.co.za. It reports that SAA operates with about double the world average of employees per aircraft (957 per plane). If Gordhan does not start to make the necessary cuts he promised, he too might find he fails the Berlusconi test.

• Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA