Saving SA from ruinous rule

Authorities in Harare ordered the Zanu-PF to take down new road signs honouring Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace.

Authorities in Harare ordered the Zanu-PF to take down new road signs honouring Robert Mugabe and his wife Grace.

Published Dec 10, 2014

Share

We can avoid Zim-style meltdown if those closer to our rulers refrain from justifying their errant ways and allow a free thinking society to thrive, writes Fikile Moya.

Pretoria - A story is told about how in 1987, Lee Iacocca, the legendary Chrysler boss bought exotic Italian carmaker Lamborghini for $25 million.

The buy did not fit in with Chrysler’s business, but Iacocca bought it to satisfy the son-of-Italian immigrants in him, so the story goes.

Nobody had the guts to stand up to Iacocca because he was a legend in the business and the boss.

The acquisition proved disastrous.

By 1994 when Chrysler sold the stake, it had cost it $60m to own Iacocca’s boyhood fantasy.

I am telling this story to answer a question many have asked about why great organisations that are the very epitome of innovation and out-of-the-box thinking suddenly find themselves moribund, led to destruction by individuals who ought to have known better.

Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF is an example of such an organisation.

Zanu-PF was the standard-bearer in the struggle against racism and colonialism. It inspired those living under the yoke of various forms of white supremacist rules across the continent to rise and demand their human rights.

Mugabe was to the liberation movement what Iacocca was to the car industry.

Looking at Zanu-PF today and how its one-time bravehearts slavishly subvert the fruits of their struggle, it would be difficult to say that this is the party young men and women gave up their lives fighting the Rhodesian racist settler-colonialist regime.

How do those war veterans look on as if Mugabe’s wife Grace – now Dr Grace Mugabe after being awarded a PhD four months after registering for it – toppling a proven war heroine and Vice-President Joice Mujuru is nothing more than an illusion of a rainbow or a mirage?

The answer must lie in the same drawer as of those who watched Iacocca almost sell his reputation and the family silver for a song – because bosses are allowed by their cowering acolytes who instead of showing their boss the error of his ways or walking away, would rather find ways of explaining and justifying their leader.

What Zimbabwe is becoming under what is turning out to be a Mugabe dynasty and the Iacocca example must spell trouble for those who are in organisations where they believe that the leader can do no wrong.

Of course some of the elements displayed by Mugabe and Zanu-PF can be observed in the ruling party in South Africa even if not at the same levels as we see in Zimbabwe.

How could former president Thabo Mbeki get away with long debates about HIV/Aids medication when the taxman’s dictum – comply and then complain – could have saved lives?

He got away with it because of the same kind of fellows now seeing Grace Mugabe’s hitherto “hidden leadership qualities”.

The defence of what is plain to see: Nkandla’s spending – is another example of the potential tyranny of acolytes.

Apartheid and exploitation of black people thrived because those who had the power to stop the government chose instead to keep voting for it in ever-increasing majorities.

How does a party like the IFP that has had one leader since its inception in 1975 think it has a moral higher ground over a Zanu-PF that has been led (in its carnation as Zanu) by Mugabe since he took over after Herbert Chitepo died in the same year as Mangosuthu Buthelezi founded his party?

Graft, indifference to governance rules and with it organisational and societal decay flourish in times when people prioritise being in the good books of the powerful than doing and saying what needs to be done or said.

We cannot all be here to fit in with the status quo.

Even the very concept of freedom could not have been if everyone was just concerned with making a living for themselves and their children.

Once free, we have a duty to be eternally vigilant. If we are not and allow forms of Orwellian mind control to set in, we would have succeeded in creating the paradox that is the freedom vehicle strangling the very political freedom it fought for.

We have to be careful not to allow the freedom party becoming the greatest obstacle to the freed thinking critically about their society.

It would be suicidal to simply say we are not Zimbabwe or Chrysler and not learn from their mistakes.

Organisations, political and business and others that have hope to sustain their reputations and continue to be relevant must start to open avenues for critical engagement instead of the more prevalent habit of punishing those who dare think their own thoughts.

If they don’t we run the risk of finding our country’s most patriotic and best minds bowing before upstarts like Grace Mugabe who think the authority to rule a nation or an organisation can be acquired in the same manner as one catches a sexually transmitted disease.

* Fikile Moya is the editor of The Mercury. Follow him @fikelelom

The Mercury

Related Topics: