Zelensky transmogrified from comedian to president, Ramaphosa doing the opposite

Political leaders need to be quick on the uptake and nimble in the execution.

One moment, you’re sitting at your desk plotting your country’s triumphant entry into Eurovision.

The next moment there’s a T-64 tank barrel pressed against your temple. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has proved to be a quick study in agility, perhaps because of his previous life as an actor and comedian.

Within days of the invasion, he was winning hearts and minds with impassioned Zoom addresses to national assemblies around the world.

And his government apparatus has been similarly impressive. Despite being deluged by Russian-inflicted chaos and carnage, streets are being swept, potholes repaired and the streetlights— where still standing — are having their burnt-out bulbs replaced.

Less impressive has been President Vladimir Putin, perhaps burdened as he is with a previous life as a toenail extractor for the KGB. No mental agility or finesse here.

The lesson is that if you’re head of an authoritarian state, you can be thick and slow because you can get away with it.

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But if you’re a politician in any kind of vaguely democratic state, you have to be alert and responsive. Except, as we well know, in South Africa.

It’s no secret that South Africa has been in a depressing downward spiral for some time.

While there is a determined chorus of columnists and business leaders who promise that all will come right if only we learnt to be “positive”, you know you’re in the dwang when the government’s own a cappella praise singers are faltering on the high notes.

Last month, outgoing Treasury director-general Dondo Mogajane was blunt.

Unless government, the public service, and politicians “get off their high horse” and start doing the essential basics, “we can start calling South Africa a failing state because the things that define a failing state are beginning to show”.

Former president Kgalema Motlanthe is similarly unsparing.

He says that South Africa today “is characterised by anarchy … there’s no order, to speak of”.

Even President Cyril Ramaphosa last year told the SA Human Rights Commission hearings into the July riots that “we are not a failed state yet”.

He quickly grasped the implications of his slip, to hastily add “… and we will not get there”.

Pollyanna journalists and corporate leaders desperate to curry political favour aside, none of this is news to ordinary South Africans.

So, what’s to be done?

Taking heed of his instructions to turn the Titanic away from the iceberg, one of Ramaphosa’s Cabinet colleagues has just announced two major initiatives.

The department of sports, arts and culture, announcing its performance plan for 2022-23, revealed that a “key focus” will be the renaming of towns and roads.

“The pace with which the transformation of the naming landscape is progressing is very slow given the number of names of towns and cities that still reflect South Africa’s colonial and apartheid heritage.”

Name changes are a “key transformation feature” to address past injustices.

“The advent of colonial and apartheid rules brought about the erosion and corrosion not only of our value system, but also of original indigenous names.”

The second critical intervention is a R22 million process to install a national monumental flag, with a flagpole that will be more than 100m in height.

“This will serve to express South Africans’ identity and pride.”

Truly, what can one say to such idiocy and a president that tolerates this kind of crap?

Zelensky transmogrified from comedian to president. Ramaphosa appears intent on doing it the other way around.