Leadership

Zinhle Sokhela:  PCB Director 

I have heard recently of projects in Sobantu which represent the desire by the community itself to improve the lives of the villagers.   In South Korea, over the past few decades, the government promoted, and sponsored, a programme which encouraged rural villages to find the means to develop themselves.    The results have been remarkable as strings of projects have resulted in significant growth of many of these villages and enhanced prosperity for the communities and their individual members.     The essential point is that government has only proposed and supported initiatives and has not implemented the projects for the communities.   

The key to this kind of home-grown improvement is leadership.   Communities need to be led by people with the skill to motivate and harness the array of skills, talents and ideas that characterise any group of people.   Yet, in our communities generally there are few leaders.   One of the reasons for this is that most people with clear leadership ability are drawn away from the community by employment.     They end up in good jobs in urban centres and, once prosperous, inevitably move to suburbia.   Their talents are lost to the communities that they were born into.   We have also seen a change in attitudes as far as volunteerism is concerned.   It is increasingly difficult to get people to occupy service roles unless there is remuneration to be paid.    I serve on the Boards of a few non profit organisations and I can see how difficult it is to recruit people to join these bodies.   We do not get paid, and the reason is that we are giving our time in the broader interest.   

In South Africa, we must face the reality of our situation.   This is that there is insufficient government money to do everything that needs to be done.    In expecting government to do more, we show our ignorance of where the money comes from.   We pay; those of us who are taxpayers or who buy groceries or anything else.    It is a simple concept.   If we want government to spend more, we must be prepared to pay more.    Many people fail to recognise this.  They seem to think that government has an inexhaustible supply of money.    Some governments think this as well.  That’s why they simply increase the amount of their treasuries by printing more.   The outcome is a situation similar to that in Zimbabwe when money has decreasing value.   It happened before in Germany in the days after the First World War when the government tried to improve its financial position by printing more money.   The result was that people had to carry their money in wheelbarrows because it was the only way that they could carry enough to buy anything.  

Everybody in South Africa, it seems, wants government to give them money.   Striking public servants want more, some people want a basic income grant, unemployed people want money to start a business and we want better hospitals, better schools, better policing, and so on.   There is simply not enough for rural and other marginalised communities to wait, hands outstretched, for money to be given.    The shortage of decent housing is so large that it will take years before the backlogs are eliminated, but people continue to wait patiently for government to provide.   I suggest that if communities are able to organise themselves, with the guidance of credible local leaders, they could achieve a good deal themselves, thereby showing government that they, ahead of others, deserve to be high on the list for assistance.

I don’t think that we encourage leadership in this country.   We are all conscious of political leaders who are sometimes not leaders at all, but simply people who occupy positions of some stature.   We give them a level of reverence that is not deserved.    We identify celebrities who we also confuse with leaders just because they have high profiles.   People who inherit positions may also not be leaders, even though they have the advantage of some rank in the community.  The weakness starts in schools where leaders are sometimes mistaken for rebels, young people who don’t want to comply without understanding why they should do so.   This is where leadership should be nurtured.   Some nurturing is done by example.   I write in the midst of a strike when teachers who don’t wish to strike have been intimidated into doing so and schools forced to close.   Will this example promote leadership?    I doubt it.

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