Veteran commentator Allister Sparks is author of the forthcoming First Drafts, to be released by Jonathan Ball later this month. In the Business Day today, he writes that SA deserves better than it’s getting from its current leadership:
OUR country badly needs clear leadership. The silence at the top while cacophony rages in the ranks below is causing confusion and uncertainty. There is a sense of drift in the air.
One can understand why President Jacob Zuma is so hesitant to spell out his own vision of the road ahead.
He is presiding over a fractious coalition that is at war with itself, and to choose any side too clearly in that power struggle is to risk alienating the other and suffering the fate of the departed Thabo Mbeki . So he prevaricates, hoping that by lending an attentive ear to everyone without explicitly siding with any he can keep all sufficiently unruffled to stay in the big alliance tent.
Thus has Mbeki become Banquo’s ghost, spooking Zuma into a state of inertia at a time when the country cries out for strong, decisive leadership to deal with a range of structural problems that threaten to stunt our future growth.
The problem has as much to do with the changed character of the African National Congress (ANC) as with Zuma’s political inhibitions. From its inception, the ANC has been a coalition drawn together from all sectors of the ideological spectrum for the common purpose of opposing first, the Land Act of 1913, then later to waging the broader liberation struggle against apartheid.
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