ZIYAD MOTALA | A billionaire is not a leadership programme

Sowetan editor Sibongakonke Shoba assures readers that he “holds no brief for Motsepe”. He then spends much of his column writing one.

His argument is curious. Patrice Motsepe polls well. He is enormously wealthy. He is influential in world football. His tenure at CAF has enhanced his global profile. His potential ANC rivals are unimpressive. Therefore, apparently, the ANC needs Motsepe more than Motsepe needs the ANC.

There is only one rather important omission. What, precisely, are Motsepe’s qualifications to govern South Africa? Not his net worth. Not his international contacts. Not his name recognition. Not his position at CAF nor his leadership qualifications.

There is no discussion of Motsepe’s political philosophy, constitutional instincts, policy programme, capacity to govern a fractious democracy, commitment to accountable institutions, ability to confront corruption, willingness to challenge powerful interests, or record of standing on principle when doing so carries a price.

Instead, we are told he is rich.

South Africa is a constitutional republic, not a shareholders’ meeting. The assumption lurking beneath this genre of political commentary is becoming tiresome: that extraordinary commercial success somehow carries with it a transferable certificate of political wisdom. Accumulate enough billions and one apparently acquires, by osmosis, the qualities necessary to govern more than 60-million people.

By that logic, the Forbes list should replace the ballot paper.

Wealth is not a moral defect. Neither is it evidence of political courage. The relevant question is not how much money Motsepe possesses but what his public behaviour tells us about his instincts when confronted by power.

Here the evidence becomes considerably less flattering. In Davos in 2020, Motsepe sat before Donald Trump and announced that “Africa loves you”. This was after Trump’s birther crusade against Barack Obama, after his reported description of African countries in grotesquely derogatory terms as “shithole countries”, after the Muslim travel ban and only weeks after Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Africa had not commissioned Motsepe to deliver its affection. He later apologised and conceded that he had no right to speak for anyone but himself. That episode matters because presidents require a certain relationship with power. They occasionally have to resist it.

More recently, Motsepe has provided another demonstration of his instincts through his extraordinary devotion to Fifa president Gianni Infantino. All 54 African football associations have lined up behind the controversial and morally challenged Infantino, while Motsepe explains his own support through the touching revelation that Infantino is a “loyal friend” and that one does not stab loyal friends in the back.

This may be admirable advice for choosing a best man. It is an astonishing principle for institutional governance.

Infantino’s record includes the ridiculous Fifa Peace Prize bestowed upon Trump, his pledge that Trump could count on his support, the presidential intervention surrounding US footballer Folarin Balogun’s suspension, Fifa’s impotence when Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan was denied entry to the US, and the remarkable contrast between the speed with which Russia was suspended and the jurisprudential marathon produced over Israel and Gaza.

Motsepe surveys all this and offers loyalty.

That is evidence about leadership but Shoba does not engage with it. Nor does he confront what Motsepe’s stewardship of CAF shows. Fifty-four African associations, 54 institutional consciences, one opinion. Not one dissenter. Such unanimity behind a deeply compromised figure may impress those who confuse obedience with leadership. Anyone concerned with democratic values or moral fibre should find it profoundly unsettling.

Shoba instead treats Motsepe’s CAF presidency as evidence of stature. But holding high office is not evidence that one has exercised it with courage. A title tells us where somebody sits, not whether they have a spine once seated there.

Even Shoba’s assertion that Motsepe does not “need” the ANC because of his wealth is peculiar. Since when did financial independence become a qualification for democratic leadership? Money proves wealth. Nothing more.

There is also something revealing in Shoba’s treatment of Motsepe’s lack of a political and governmental record. He dismisses concern that Motsepe has not risen through ANC structures as gatekeeping and invokes historical precedent. But working through the ranks of a political organisation, particularly one governing the country, is hardly an irrational criterion. It provides a record against which political judgment, administrative competence, coalition-building, accountability and the ability to manage competing interests can actually be assessed.

A president need not emerge from a party conveyor belt. But some demonstrated history of governance is not an unreasonable thing to ask of somebody being proposed to govern South Africa.

Nor does Shoba’s historical analogy of Dr James Moroka carry the weight he places upon it. His example comes from an era when the ANC was not governing a constitutional state. Leadership of a liberation movement under different historical conditions hardly establishes that political or governmental experience is irrelevant today.

Motsepe’s problem is therefore not simply that he has failed to climb the ANC ladder. It is that Shoba offers almost nothing else in its place. No governing record. No demonstrated political philosophy. No history of difficult public decisions. No evidence of institutional reform. No example of standing against powerful interests when principle required it. Indeed, the public record examined above points in the opposite direction: accommodation of power, deference to powerful men, and loyalty where independence was required.

Dismissing the absence of a record does not amount to supplying one. That is the hole in Shoba’s column. We are given electability without character, wealth without political philosophy, prominence without courage and international access without evidence that Motsepe knows when powerful men should be resisted rather than courted.

South Africa should demand from any prospective president judgment, independence, democratic conviction, an examinable record and the courage to say no when saying yes would be easier. On the public evidence Shoba presents, he has not demonstrated that Patrice Motsepe possesses those qualities.

He has demonstrated that Motsepe is a billionaire.

We knew that already.

• Prof Motala is a professor of law at the Howard University School of Law

Sowetan