A question of leadership skills

Last week, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, the vice-president of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) who also serves as Namibia’s deputy prime minister and minister of international affairs, made an indicting remark about her country’s youth leadership.

Swapo’s senior leadership was willing to pass on the baton to young people. But, alas, Namibia’s youth leadership stratum was unimpressive.

“We are ready to pass on the seats but when you see the calibre of young people we have and the utterances they make on social media; we are worried as to what will happen to the country …”

Calls for the participation of young people in especially political leadership positions has gained traction in South Africa over the past decade. In response, the 54th conference of the ANC in December 2017 endorsed the party’s “Youth League proposal [that] a quota (25- 40%) in all leadership positions [must] be reserved for youth”.

The ANC Youth League (ANCYL) would hold President Cyril Ramaphosa to the resolution when it pressed for a 20% youth representation in the Cabinet following the 2019 national general elections. The league’s former president, Collen Maine, asserted that the ANC “should give young people a responsibility and young people would bring new ideas”.

Maine also pointed out that: “Most of the ministers have been there since 1994 and it’s time that young people are also given an opportunity because that resonate[s] well with the majority of the country’s population.”

The eThekwini ANCYL spokesperson, Thulisa Ndlela, further suggested that those who had served in the Cabinet from 1994 should not be given ministerial responsibilities, adding that: “You cannot have an old-age home Cabinet.”

Evidently, the participation of young people in leadership positions exercises the minds of political (and presumably other) players in the wider southern African region and beyond. Similarly, there are different considerations at play.

Nandi-Ndaitwah’s remark is instructive because it underscores the scrutiny required of those who aspire for leadership. Sentiment and plausible self-interest do not permit for such critical examination of the calibre of those who make themselves available for leadership. In and of its own, the fact of youth is neither a sufficient, nor a sole consideration, for leadership.

There are advisedly factors such as leaders’ academic and skills’ credentials, commitment to public service, track record in the execution of certain tasks, worldliness, piety, empathy, decisiveness and many others that merit our contemplation. Maine and the ANCYL, on the other hand, seem to hold that young people automatically “bring new ideas”.

Apart from the fact that empirically, Maine and fellow travellers have not demonstrated cogency of ideas, youth does not necessarily equate a fountain of ideas. Nevertheless, whatever ideas they might have should advisedly be delineated, lest the quota come to be filled by those who do not possess, in sufficient stock, the attributes required for leadership.

A youth league of a party like the ANC, which has the dual task of changing society for the better and has its own self-renewal to carry out, has an added obligation to articulate and promote the ideas it envisages the youth who come to fill the 25-40% ought to advance. It surely cannot be about filling quotas for its own sake.

The primary consideration ought to be the realisation of sustained progressive social change by a cultivated and meritorious leadership corps which, in turn, promotes excellence and meritocracy in society. A quota system especially for young people reflects one aspect of succession planning for continuity into the future.

The larger issue is the leadership – young and otherwise – society requires to answer the principal and diverse challenges and problems of a given period. In this context, one of the success factors of the democratic project will be its capacity to draw on board a diverse intergenerational and multidemographic mix of suitably and potentially qualified leaders whose individual and combined strengths stand the country in good stead.

Approached this way, there is no need for hyperbolic statements that impugn the credentials and contributions of senior leaders – while at the same time normalising vulgarity in our political culture – who have accumulated useful experience to the construction of a post-apartheid South Africa.

Appreciating the challenges placed at its feet, such diverse leadership would, hopefully, pay particular attention to life-long learning and positive social and political mentorship as worthy goals. Unlike much of the Western world on which most of our leadership approach is based, the Chinese succession model is generational rather than individual in nature.

A leadership collective assumes the reigns of leadership for a duration of 10 years, after which it retires, giving way to another. Obviously, the practice is an outcome of an established tradition in a society that has evolved differently. It does not necessarily lend itself to copying, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Nandi-Ndaitwah’s concern reflects a party and national system that is overwhelmed by leadership notions that privilege quantity more than the quality required for the success of any project for progressive social change.

Alongside the subjective and even the self-injurious pursuits of individual political parties, the genesis of such quantity might well be one of the outcomes of an unequal post-colonial and developing economy which, like ours, has not created opportunities for sufficient numbers of people, especially the youth.

In this scenario, politics becomes one of the available easy pickings, while the political wage bill slowly but surely grows in tandem with prevailing economic paucity. Political and social polarisation, which in the South African case invariably assumes an essentially racial characteristic, becomes the stock in trade of political and social discourse.

The matter is, therefore, evidently much broader than the participation of young people in political leadership positions. It concerns overall national stability and the multiple steps required to achieve it. Yet another implication is the nature of the South African political party.

In a party system such as ours, the party plays a catalytic role in producing the leadership which is imbued with the attributes to effect progressive social change. Successfully to address the challenges of our complex society, political parties ought to strive towards a meritorious leadership system.

Mukoni Ratshitanga. Picture: Neil McCartney

Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator

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