Duties of the President

Dr Xolela Mangcu argued in the Business Day on 16 July 2009 that those calling on president Zuma to comment on the social problems facing the country are being mischievous. His article appears below. What is interesting is that Dr Mangcu does not clarify the role of a president in a Constitutional Democracy. I deal with this is my letter to the Editor which follows in the next post:


"Zuma must beware the booby-trapped calls for ‘leadership’
XOLELA MANGCU
Published: 2009/07/16 06:38:38 AM

THIS is a plea to President Jacob Zuma to please ignore the hypochondriacs. These are the people who are so dependent on the idea of the leader as the “big man” that they are now having withdrawal symptoms.

This reliance on the big man — or “die hoofleier”, or “the chief” — lies deep in the history of this country. It’s a political culture we inherited from Jan van Riebeeck right through to all those vainglorious 19th century colonial governors. The history of the 20th century is littered with these big men, and they were all men — Paul Kruger, Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, DF Malan, Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, PW Botha and FW de Klerk.
I may have missed some of these unlikable characters but I’m sure you get the drift. Dan O’Meara illustrates this culture brilliantly in his book, Forty Lost Years, the best thing written on the history of the National Party.

O’Meara also makes the observation, first made by Steve Biko in the 1970s, that people such as Verwoerd went beyond just Afrikaner nationalism to the construction of an overarching culture of white supremacy that included English-speaking whites.
In his brilliant column on this page yesterday, Steven Friedman described how the pervasiveness of white supremacist thinking produced a culture that always treats black people as suspect and gives the benefit of the doubt to the worst white people. Indeed, how does an unreconstructed racist such as David Bullard achieve the status of a superstar in the white community? Well, in the same way that a white person with a standard four could spit in the face of a black doctor or lawyer and be decorated as a hero.

Just as this society and its institutions have taken white mediocrity to be the standard, we have inherited the reliance on “die hoofleier” or “the chief” in the democratic era.
Our evolution over the past 10 years was shepherded by two very different big men — Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki . I shall resist the temptation to elaborate on the differences between them. Let’s just say one was tall and one was short — literally and figuratively.
The absurdity of the “big man” logic is that Zuma is expected to solve every major problem we otherwise cannot solve.

And if he should fail, then he would have failed as a leader, which would then confirm what the Bullards secretly wished for in the first place, so that all manner of racist stereotypes could then be confirmed.

While the pleas for “leadership” may sound the most reasonable thing for citizens to ask of a president, they are actually not that innocent. In reality, these are pleas not just for Zuma to intervene, but to intervene on the side of those who make the pleas. Clever. But don’t take the bait, Mr President. Instead, provide the platform for us to work out our problems.
If all the legacy you left was a nation in conversation with itself in search of solutions for its problems, then you would have done more than most presidents in history.

There will no doubt be times when you have to make decisive interventions. But even as you do that, avoid the trap of seeming to have answers for everything. That would make you a pretender. People don’t like pretenders. If you don’t believe me, ask your predecessor.
If I were to advise you on one thing, it would be to recommend one of the best pieces I have ever read on political leadership. It’s a chapter titled “Neither Leaders Nor Followers” in Benjamin Barber’s A Passion for Democracy. He warns us about the idea of the leader as the big man thus: “Public officials displaying an omnicompetent mastery of their public responsibilities unburden private men and women of their responsibilities.”

He warns that “the people are apt to cry ‘what will we do without him?’ and doubt whether they can go on. What is really only a departure is experienced as a loss and an incapacitation.”
Frankly this is the stuff that makes presidents think they are indispensable and gets them conspiring to extend their stay in office, by any means necessary. Who can blame them when we build them into the dictators we later decry? But if we cannot learn from our most recent history, then what shall be our guide?

Mangcu is affiliated to the University of Johannesburg and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution".