Whenever my friends and I discuss leadership, which is often, I find myself going back to a story told by Nelson Mandela in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
It is set in Lobatse, in 1962, back when Botswana was known as Bechuanaland. Madiba had illegally skipped SA and was on his way to a pan-African movement conference in Ethiopia that was to be attended by anti-colonial leaders from all regions of the continent.
The invite to the conference came at a time when the debate within and outside the ANC was still raging about the decision of the organisation and its allies to take up an armed struggle and form uMkhonto we Sizwe, its military wing.
Mandela was MK’s commander-in-chief and had been at the forefront of agitating for the abandonment of the non-violent approach to the Struggle after the killing of over 90 people in the Sharpeville massacre, as well as the banning of the ANC, the PAC and other organisations opposed to apartheid.
Hence, he had become a target of condemnation by those not convinced that armed resistance would bring about African liberation and an end to apartheid.
In the days that he waited to get a flight from Bechuanaland to Ethiopia, he’d spend much of his time hiking on the hills of Lobatse with one of his Transkei homeboys, Max Mlonyeni.
It was during one of these walks that he spotted a troop of baboons going up a hill. He followed them for a while and, according to the book, enjoyed their “military-like organisation and movement”.
What impressed Madiba the most was that the leader would spring ahead of the rest to show them the way forward and they would follow.
After observing this for a while, Mandela turned to Mlonyeni and said: “Jonga Max! This is exactly what a leader does, he moves ahead to show the others the way but not too far ahead that they lose each other.”
I could not help but remember this anecdote as I, along with millions of South Africans, experienced much joy on Friday with the national soccer team taking yet another decisive step towards qualifying for the next Soccer World Cup tournament.
The game was against Lesotho, yes, but modern experience has taught us that, indeed, the TV soccer commentator was right when he famously said “there is no therefore” in football, emphasising the importance of focusing on the present and not relying on past successes or making assumptions about future outcomes.
If there was a “therefore”, a storied national team like Nigeria’s — full of athletes who ply their trade in famous European cities — would not have fallen last year to semi-professionals from Lesotho, the best of whom play in the South African national first division.
But our sheer joy on Friday was not just that Relebohile “President yama2000s” Mofokeng and Jayden Adams scored those beautiful second-half goals, but that we have a national team that all of us are truly proud of.
The last time Bafana Bafana qualified for the Fifa World Cup, without doing so by being the tournament’s hosts, president Thabo Mbeki was hardly halfway through his first term.
A string of poor performances since then turned the once-universally loved Bafana Bafana into a batch of no-hopers.
But, under coach Hugo Henri Broos, the nation is rekindling its love for Bafana. As we once again witnessed on Friday in Polokwane, the team’s games are now consistently sold-out affairs. The passionate support is unconditional too; gone is the backward tribalism that used to make fans back a squad based on whether players from their favourite PSL team had been selected or not.
We would be dishonest, however, if we said that Broos, since his appointment in 2021, has always enjoyed universal support. There were many times in the beginning of his tenure when fans and soccer pundits alike called into question his selection criteria, the style of play as well as his outspokenness.
However, he did things his way anyway, confident that in the long run it would deliver the desired outcomes. In doing so, he was practising what Mandela said a leader should do — moving ahead to show the rest the path forward. With still a handful of games to go, there are no guarantees that Bafana Bafana will qualify for the World Cup or that the team will win the upcoming Africa Cup of Nations. But what is clear is that we have a coach and a team that will fight gallantly for the South African badge and flag.
We shouldn’t just be basking in the glory of Broos and Bafana’s success, however. We should also be using Mandela and Broos’s example to define the kind of leadership we need to fix our municipalities as we prepare for next year’s local government elections.
Too many municipalities are dysfunctional because they lack visionary leaders with courage to move ahead of their core constituencies and to show them what needs to be done to improve.
This is no time for “leaders” who hide behind “the collective” and earn big bucks from holding top positions without even bothering to say what they plan to do with those positions. They must follow Mandela and Broos’s example and lead from the front.
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