Reflection on the eve of the South African Elections

Fifteen years ago, I stood amidst a massive crowd on the grounds of Pretoria’s majestic Union Buildings to usher in a new era for a country whose oppressed majority population the world had been watching and rooting for since at least the early 1960s.

In my professional work, I had spent three years applying all my energies as part of an unprecedented international effort to liberate the South African masses and create a model African country poised at the leading edge of a trend towards the reclamation of the African soul and the resurgence of African pride that would reverberate throughout the Diaspora. By then, the story of South Africa’s liberation struggle had already inspired a generation from Mozambique to Nigeria to Brazil, to Papua New Guinea and even as far a field as Red Bank, New Jersey USA, my own home town. Red Bank was one of the many US towns with its own brand of Apartheid where railroad tracks divided the leafy white Eastside from our more spartan black Westside.

During the intervening years since South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, I was part of that segment of the African Diaspora for whom the country’s beacon of hope and promise served also as a magnet pulling the best and brightest away from their lives in the West and elsewhere to work alongside their counterparts in South Africa not only to honor the legacy of Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo and the ANC but to restore the dignity of African descended people everywhere through realizing the potential of a single nation.

For eight years, I called South Africa my home. In that time, I witnessed at the level of the grassroots, in townships and rural areas a wonderful spirit of cooperation and dedication to collective self-improvement as well as a pure and unconditional confidence in their new leadership who had, after all, gotten the masses this far on their long walk to freedom.

This seemingly inexorable bond between the masses and their leaders was built on an enviable level of organization and discipline that defined the South African quest for liberation. The leaders stayed connected to the people throughout and had that discipline remained over the last 15 years, the ANC could conceivably have served as a model for the new American president who has vowed to be a people’s president following a predecessor who had effectively abandoned even his own constituency.

But to be the elite of the elite and stay connected to the masses is a tall order, not least for the leader of the “free world” who is compelled to remain in a virtual mobile fortress for the duration of his tenure.

Arguably there is far less of a barrier to a link with the grassroots for the ANC leadership to overcome. That notwithstanding, the prevailing disconnection is profound and palpable leaving the masses with the same intense feeling of abandonment that we Americans felt in the 8 years preceding January 20th 2009. We African-Americans, Afro-Brits, Afro-Brazilians, Caribbeans, Africans from other parts of the Continent now share South Africans’ sense of abandonment since our collective destinies, sense of self-worth and global respect are inextricably intertwined with the leadership of South Africa – the nominal leader of the African world.

But just as the fantastically unreasonable expectations heaped on the new American president have all the potential to break the nerves of even the most capable of leader, the hope and extraordinary faith we have placed in South African leaders could be what has led to their spectacular unraveling. The long walk to freedom has ended in a u-turn.

Under Thabo Mbeki, the road back was been characterized by unchecked xenophobia, unbridled greed, the uniform exaltation of form over substance, easy money over hard work, lazy thinking over intellectual rigor and self-service over public service.

Similarly, Jacob Zuma’s presidency will be built on an illusion of a connection with the people while carrying on with business as usual down the Mbeki road to an economic Apartheid. An illusion constructed with race-baiting and in general pandering to his constituents’ lowest rather than highest human instincts – as we have seen through human history, a recipe for the most unwelcome forms of nationalism. With Zuma at the helm, what will be the future for a country that like the US, because of its history and its geopolitical position has a constituency and thus moral obligation that extends far beyond its borders? The leader of the African world having never fulfilled its potential in that role could well morph into a far less worthy title-holder - the leading example of post-colonial Africa.

What in reality connects the leadership to the masses in Africa is a universal collective lack of self respect in which failed services are tolerated and even accommodated by the masses as is humiliating treatment at the hands of European immigration officials by the African elite. The latter can only be delivered from such treatment by creating the environments necessary for the former to thrive and match African ingenuity and development with that of the rest of the world.

My new home, the Democratic Republic of Congo is part of that old Africa – the antithesis of the African Renaissance - where the Mobutu mentality still rages on and is even codified in the form of Mobutu’s famous Article 15 – use your job in government to extort the maximum! At least here, we don’t have to worry about gravity. The Article 15 mentality has already brought us to the bottom of the bottom. We can only go up from here. But to do so we are now in search of a new role model. A new leader of the African world to inspire us to transcend the laws of gravity, resist temptation and remain at the level of our highest and best collective selves.

In the meantime, our beloved South Africa has lost its magnetic charm and in the process its way. Who will lead the African century now?