Why are the people who want to lead us so uninspiring?

When last have you asked a kid who they look up to and they answered with the name of a politician? Maybe some want to be Cyril Ramaphosa, but that’s only because he’s president. I bet nobody wanted to be him when he was in charge of cadre deployment.

No kid wants to be John Steenhuisen, Herman Mashaba, Gayton McKenzie and certainly not Pieter Groenewald. Julius Malema? Eh. They may like him but I’ll still hedge my bets that nobody wants to be him.

And the reason has been made even more evident with Rodger Jardine pulling his team out of the race.

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Let’s start with the ex-DA club; Mmusi Maimane and Mashaba. They want to tell us they can bring positive change to the country but could hardly bring positive change to the party they were once leaders in.

They could (and would) argue that they were up against it trying to change some old mindsets but that brings up an awkward question. If you couldn’t handle a couple of ballies and a madam, how can you believe in yourself to handle load shedding, the ANC, structural corruption and an entire economy? No matter how bad you say the situation was when you were leading, the situation is worse where you want to lead and the escapism track record doesn’t inspire much faith.

“Whoopsy. Things are looking difficult. Let’s bail and start anew with less resources, less political capital and some fun words… to do the things I promised to do before but couldn’t because of reasons that magically disappeared when I did my own thing.” This is the basic manifesto of every DA leaver.

And it’s not like ANC leavers COPED any better. To be fair, COPE was a lot of fun to deposit the remainder of our hope but that ended in tears too and MK v.2 beta can hardly hope to do more than outsource to India via Dubai. I mean, it worked for Microsoft and Apple, why not Zuma?

As the bar to be offended slides down, how is it that our view of being taken for jackasses is somewhat immune. Isn’t it mad? Shouldn’t we be looking at failures of leaders trying to create a second career wind out of little more than fart gas and telling them to bugger off?

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You had your chances! We only have elections every five years. This isn’t exactly a primary school interact club recycling programme. This is the leadership of a sovereign nation and you, the purported leadership, are treating it like some computer game with the cheat for infinite lives, but you’ve forgotten the code for infinite money.

If you couldn’t handle it the first time, step aside and make room for those who are up for the challenges you failed in. At the very least, win our trust back and admit that you sucked. Don’t blame the ANC for being corrupt or the DA for being bullies. Admit that you were in there and could have done things differently to bring change from within. If you can’t even do that, how can we begin to trust you with the keys to the cabinet?

It makes absolutely no sense to gift failures with another five years. This isn’t kindergarten for wannabe presidents. It’s the real deal and it would be wonderful if presidential hopefuls could start by treating it as such.

So, when Jardine says that the ConCourt ruling makes things difficult for him and his peeps to run, I do some quick math. Signatures needed are 15% of the number of votes needed to secure a seat in the previous election? Cool. Al Jama-ah got a seat with 31 468 votes. 15% of that is 4 720. And seriously, if you can’t believe in yourself to get 5 000 signatures and raise a couple of bucks, you shouldn’t expect us to believe in you to fix the country.

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