Old-style oppression has new adversaries

Josef Stalin cynically said: “A single death is a tragedy — a million deaths is a statistic.” He prosecuted his tyranny, replete with mass murder, according to this formula.
There is some accuracy in the tyrant’s observation. Perhaps that is why one 12-year-old boy, Hector Pieterson, is the iconic embodiment of the June 16 uprising against apartheid. Although hundreds of lives were lost when the riots spread into intractable national unrest, Sam Nzima’s photograph of the shot boy being carried by his sister and a fellow student was the freeze-frame that catapulted this event into the consciousness of the world.
Two Saturdays ago in Tehran, a 26-year-old woman was shot dead by an Iranian government militiaman. The video clip of music student Neda Agha-Soltan’s dying moments captured on a cellphone was bounced across the globe by satellite and through new media such as YouTube, stamping her instantly as a symbol of the anti-government protests.
The Iranian opposition proclaimed her as a martyr for freedom in a society that, as Nazila Fathi noted in the New York Times, “is infused with the culture of martyrdom”.
Two days after her death, there were already 6860 entries for her on the Persian-language Google search engine. Perhaps the potency of the new media is revealed by the fact that Mirhossein Mousavi, the main opposition candidate in the disputed, probably rigged, presidential election in Iran, has used social network Facebook to mobilise his supporters. Twitter is another new tool of communication against the theocrats in Tehran, who base their authority on a religious tradition that is more than 13 centuries old.
The incompatibility between old-style repression and newfangled media is only one of many contradictions that the tumultuous events in Iran have highlighted.
Another is the fault line which the poll, and the protests against its outcome, revealed between the two plates of the Iranian revolution — one theocratic and the other democratic.
Most power in Iran is wielded by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and various religious bodies such as the Guardian Council.
Lesser authority lies in the hands of the democratic parliament and the popularly elected president.
Under the rule of populist conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there was little to separate the outlook and approach of the two branches of the Iranian revolution. But reformist challenger Mousavi became a lightning conductor for the young and disaffected, especially marginalised women, who have spearheaded the protests in the firm belief that massive fraud prevented their candidate from winning.
The signs of splits and fissures, even within the previously united religious leadership, are clear, although the direction in which the 30-year old Iranian revolution will head is not. There has been a stirring of a moderate revival elsewhere in this most combustible arena of geopolitics, in Lebanon and in next-door Iraq, for example.
But, of course, the issue in Iran — and one with huge consequences for this troubled neighbourhood — is its nuclear potential.
Although Ayatollah Khamenei has the final word on nuclear and security matters, both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, and most Iranians, apparently see the development of nuclear power as a totem of their sovereign independence. However, there is obviously a difference in approach between the president, who threatens to “remove Israel from the map of history” and announces that Iran has successfully tested a new solid-fuel missile with a range of 1900km, and a challenger who denounces his opponent’s “foreign policy adventurism”.
This then brings in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Before the Iranian election, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, in an authoritative article, stated that Netanyahu’s actions are “shaped by a profound conviction that Israel will be in danger of extermination if Iran has nuclear weapons at its disposal”.
It also quoted a recent interview, which the prime minister gave to an American journal under the headline Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran or I Will.
Influential Middle East watchers in the US have suggested that Netanyahu far prefers to face the anti-Semitic Ahmadinejad, who has suggested the Holocaust was a hoax, as president than his rival.
As one of them expressed it: “Israelis believe he reflects the true and immutable character of the Iranian regime. If a moderate were to take over, it would not herald any real change in Iran or its nuclear ambitions, but simply disguise it better.”
The repression of the pro-democracy demonstrations on the streets of Tehran suggests that Netanyahu will be granted his wish in the choice of his opponent. After all, bullets are more powerful, in the short term at least, than Twitter. But, over time, the ineradicable human craving for freedom is more difficult to suppress.
We can only guess how much time will lapse between the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan and the arrival of the freedom she now symbolises.

*Published Sunday Times 6 July 2009

Meaning of the f-word to be a battle zone over the next year

IN A recent interview, Co-operative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka raised the question: “Do we need provinces?” and suggested that a definitive answer would be given by the government next March. I thought it significant that his ministry had once enjoyed the title of “constitutional and provincial affairs”. Perhaps its renaming is a harbinger of things to come.
The minister’s speculation, coupled with his demand that “nobody is expected to be out of tune” with the country and its president, brought to mind how central the provinces were to the Kempton Park negotiations, which led to the inauguration of democracy in SA, and how comprehensively the African National Congress (ANC) out-negotiated its opponents on this issue. This was due to both the balance of forces and the burden of our history.
The f-word during the negotiations was not a vulgar expletive, but the politically loaded idea of federalism. Democratic Party (DP) negotiator Colin Eglin — whose party’s central plank was the promotion of a federal dispersal of authority as an alternative to untrammelled majoritarianism — recalled how the Bantustan policy of the National Party (NP) “had given federalism a bad name”. He therefore, during negotiations, tiptoed around the topic by using code: “I tried to avoid using the word federalism in advancing my arguments, preferring to use the cumbersome but less repellent phrase, ‘constitutional decentralisation’” to advance the case for provincial powers in the new constitutional set-up .
Inkatha’s position at the negotiations was the opposite of the prevailing political wind: it wanted a federal SA to give it more power, given its lock on support in Natal. The ANC wanted a unitary state precisely to prevent that eventuality. The case, however, was never properly prosecuted since Inkatha was boycotting the negotiations in pursuance of an issue — the role and place of the k ing — which today, seems remote and obscure.
The NP, which during the negotiations still held the formal reins of power, made a confused and enfeebled fight for federalism. It understood it was likely to be knocked off its national perch of power in the elections, and reduced to a regional redoubt in the Western Cape. But its strategy was far more focused on dividing the spoils of office at a national level through power-sharing than in according the provinces significant, and original, powers. As the most reliable chronicler of the negotiations’ process, Patti Waldmeir described it: “After 45 years of ruling a highly centralised old South African state, the NP seemed to have little idea of what federalism meant, and only a weak inclination to fight for it.”
With the NP confused, Inkatha absent and the DP speaking in code, it was little wonder that the ANC prevailed. Indeed Waldmeir obtained an accurate assessment of the location of power in the new SA from a key negotiator: “Joe Slovo, speaking freely out of exhaustion and drink on the eve of the deal, insisted that the new state would be ‘not remotely a federation ... we’ve managed to give them devolution, without losing control’, he told me with considerable satisfaction.”
Slovo was to die within a year of the establishment of the new order; the NP received in Hermann Giliomee’s apt phrase a “prostitute’s funeral” after the 2004 elections; the Inkatha Freedom Party has been ousted from power in KwaZulu-Natal and the DP has morphed into the Democratic Alliance, but won control of the Western Cape .
But just how accurate and prescient Slovo’s boast has proven to be was on display in Cape Town this week. Provincial Premier Helen Zille — political boss of the only province in the hands of the opposition — was reduced to taking legal advice and writing a letter to the newspaper to explain that the Provincial Commissioner of the SAPS, Mzwandile Petros, refuses to meet with her and the provincial MEC for policing, Lennit Max. Given the agenda Zille had in mind for the meeting, including the allegation that the police had sexed-up the crime statistics in this crime-ravaged province, the commissioner’s coyness was understandable. But, of course, he is answerable and accountable to Pretoria, not Cape Town.
A glance at the exclusive powers which the constitution grants to the provinces yields a decidedly threadbare list. Schedule 5 grants it sole jurisdiction over such matters as abattoirs, ambulances, and culture and veterinary services. But in the areas of delivery, the provinces currently are the public’s interface with both hospitals and schools. Little wonder, then, that when he was minister of national education, Kader Asmal once remarked to me that, in comparison with his provincial counterparts, he felt “like a eunuch in a harem. I have the desire to act, but not the power.”
Interestingly, as the ANC moves to further centralise power, the DA is moving in the opposite direction. Its key parliamentary staff, including national strategist and MP Ryan Coetzee have taken leave of Parliament and relocated to the provincial government and the Office of the Premier.
The battle of the provinces — and the meaning and extent of the “f” word in our constitutional arrangements — is likely to be a key battleground arena over the next year. It remains to be seen whether the federalists are more successful in the next, perhaps final, round than they were at Kempton Park.

*Published Business Day 4 July 2009

Those were the days... Scams define end of an era

The sub-prime fiasco was a pyramid scheme of its own, argues Thomas Friedman
Ronald Reagan is dead and Margaret Thatcher is a remote and, through advanced illness, a figure far removed from the world stage.
The revolution they jointly led in the ’80s of ever-advancing markets based on light regulation, easy credit, distrust of the state and unleashing of the “animal spirits” of capitalist accumulation have been discredited as the world faces the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the cardiac arrest suffered by world markets, including our own, since the collapse of Lehman Brothers on Wall Street last September has brought to light a series of mega-sized Ponzi schemes in the US and, more recently, in South Africa. The lure of easy, outsize pickings and staggeringly high rates of return explains the existence of pyramid schemes, such as those operated by Bernard Madoff, Allen Stanford and our own alleged Ponzi king, Barry Tannenbaum, now conveniently resident in Australia.
Ponzi schemes — named after the eponymous Italian immigrant to the US in the early 20th century who arbitraged the value of postage stamps — essentially pay back early investors with either the proceeds acquired from later investors or even with their own money. The scheme collapses and the fraud is finally revealed when people stop investing and there is no more loot to pay out the creditors. As author Michael Lewis explains, “something for nothing — it never loses its charm”.
Madoff, who apparently embezzled a staggering 50-billion from the rich and even banks and top charitable institutions, kept his operation going for over 30 years by offering consistently above-market rates of return, but not by such a wide margin as to attract either undue suspicion or to be unsustainable — until the unprecedented credit crunch last year caused a mass of withdrawals, which Madoff could not meet, since he had never invested most of the deposits originally received.
Tannenbaum, in contrast, is alleged to have lured hundreds of South African and overseas investors with the promise of a rate of return of between 90% and 200% per annum. Instead of postage stamps, his investors were invited to help buy active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), allegedly on behalf of South African drug-makers, and then shared in the proceeds of the profits when the APIs were sold to the drug companies.
The neatness of the scheme is that it fell outside the watch of the Financial Services Board. But when one creditor sought to recoup his investment, plus interest, well, the bird had flown the coop — and the personal cheques which Tannenbaum had issued were dishonoured.
These schemes usually involve high-level fraud, including cooking the books, and financial techniques to make actual losses look like bumper profits, or simply invent non-existent investments or sales. But the detail is less significant than the result. Not only are investors — the greedy, the gullible and innocent third parties — ruined, but the system itself gets discredited.
Last December, when the Madoff scandal broke, I was living temporarily in Washington DC. Two of the city’s most thoughtful commentators saw a much wider implication for the future of free enterprise.
Anne Applebaum described how difficult it was for her to acquire an apartment in Warsaw in the early ’90s — endless form-filling, visits to notaries and the seller requiring to be paid in hard currency and in cash. She described a culture of “low trust”, in which the market and its mechanisms are treated with suspicion.
In contrast, when she bought a car in Washington, she could drive it out of the showroom simply by providing a personal cheque, without any identification. It was this “high trust” culture, which both fuelled American capitalism and allowed its dark underside, in the form of Madoff and the like, to operate. As she put it, “Madoff’s pyramid scheme may have been made possible by our tradition of trust and lawfulness. And now he will bring that tradition down.”
Thomas Friedman was more damning. He saw in Madoff a scheme only slightly more outrageous than the “legal” one Wall Street was running, fuelled by easy credit, low standards and high greed. For him, the sub-prime fiasco was a pyramid scheme of its own: “What do you call giving a worker who makes 14000 a year, a nothing-down and nothing-to-pay-for-two-years mortgage to buy a 750000 home and then bundling that mortgage with hundreds of others into bonds that Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s rate AAA — and then selling them to banks and pension funds the world over. This is what the financial industry was doing. If that isn’t a pyramid scheme, what is?”
Friedman’s fury found an answer last week, when President Barack Obama produced plans for regulatory reform, including an expanded role for government. Clearly, the era of Reagan-Thatcher has ended. The age of exuberance has yielded to an era of control. Let’s just hope that the new medicine doesn’t amount to a treatment that kills the patient.


*Published Sunday Times 28 June 2009

State religion does not have all the answers to jobs crisis

OUR state religion appears to be the worship of the state. Heaven knows, to sustain the analogy, there now appear to be no shortage of new and unlikely adherents to this belief. Barack Obama’s administration is now effectively the controlling shareholder of General Motors and Gordon Brown’s government owns 70% of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The deep global recession has created some unlikely converts from unfettered market capitalism to more state directed economic leadership.
But, back home in SA, as I surveyed the jobs massacre contained in the figures for the first quarter released this week, which show that 179000 jobs were lost and that the “distressed labour market” could yet shed another 200000 jobs before year-end, it occurred to me that what we need now is a healthy dose of local agnosticism in order to innovate and create new work. In other words, less ideology and more realism.
Last Friday, Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel appeared to make an important concession: he said that government’s policy of promoting “decent work” would not exclude “the creation of temporary, low-paid jobs in the short term”. He made the further concession that the 500000 jobs to be created under the expanded public works programme “would not, in themselves, be proper, permanent, well-paid jobs”, but they could create a bridge into the labour market.
This dose of realism seemed to be in line with the candour of Trevor Manuel , who in his previous incarnation as finance minister said, after presenting his last budget in Parliament, that the problem with “decent work” in a time of crisis was that “all jobs are hard to come by, and the more adjectives you add, the harder they will be”. Or, as the old adage expressed it, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all.
Whether these statements represent shafts of light or a false dawn on the gloomy debate around job creation is difficult to assess. This becomes even more apparent when the assault launched by Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana on labour brokers and the casualisation of work is taken into account. Last month, he told the congress of the National Union of Mineworkers , “the reality is labour broking is a form of human trafficking. These companies sell the labour of workers to the highest bidder and then pay them the lowest wage ... it allows workers to be traded for profit just as if they were meat and vegetables.”
When I visited the headquarters of the largest private employment agency in SA, Adcorp , this week, I expected after the minister’s pronouncement to find a Dickensian pit of human misery. Instead, the ultramodern office block in Bryanston houses a go-ahead company where I had an interesting discussion with the splendidly named Loane Sharp, who serves as the company’s labour market analyst.
He made the point that the much-maligned labour brokers represent a R23bn industry, which since 2000 has introduced about 3,5- million temporary, part-time and contract employees into the labour force, approximately 2- million of whom are first-time jobseekers, 92% of whom are African, and 85% of whom are aged 18-35. Of even more significance was his analysis that a third of these employees secured traditional permanent jobs within a year and 47% did so within three years.
In other words, far from being reprehensible and “human traffickers”, the brokers are, in fact, SA’s principal entry point into the labour market for unemployed African youth.
Sharp’s analysis runs counter to the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (Cosatu’s) blunt instrument: they are calling for a ban on labour broking, which could lead to the loss of, perhaps, a million jobs. The labour minister is advocating the quasi or de facto nationalisation of private employment agencies. But the agenda behind this agenda is, simply, that the bulk of these temporary or casual workers are nonunionised. They, therefore, compound Cosatu’s crisis of relevance and its shrinking membership and revenue base.
Another voice, which deserves to be heard is the estimably sensible one provided by Ann Bernstein and the Centre for Development and Enterprise/Business Leadership SA’s “5- million jobs initiative”. They offer a welter of practical initiatives to resolve the exquisite Catch 22 in which the vast pool of young, unskilled jobseekers find themselves. As Bernstein put it: “They can’t get a job because they have no work experience and they can’t get work experience because they can’t get a job”.
The most persuasive statistic the centre provides to bolster this assertion is the fact that more than 70% of 15-30 year olds who want a job have never been able to find one.
To quote the vanquished Thabo Mbeki , the crisis on the job front calls for a “business unusual” approach. And that means that adherents to the old gospel of the state religion need to listen to a few agnostic voices.

*Published 26 June 2009 in Business Day

Goals have little to do with soccer

Before this week’s blood-curdling threats issued against me by the Justice for Hlophe Alliance force me into the obscurity of a witness-protection programme, I thought that, like the nation, now in thrall to the Confederations Cup, I’d switch attention from politics to soccer.

But I’ve discovered that there is more than a stitch or two that threads together two of our nation’s, and the world’s, favourite pastimes.
And I’ve also learnt another of the perils confronting the apprentice weekly columnist: the tyranny of the deadline. This prevents me from knowing whether yesterday’s clash between Bafana Bafana and Spain reclaimed our national honour or not.

But last Sunday’s opening between our boys and Iraq resulted in what that country’s latter-day conqueror, George W Bush, would have called an “underwhelming” performance.
We stuttered to a goalless draw, and our team ignored the advice of the Sunday Times’s soccer maven, Carlos Amato, who had warned them that nothing short of “Zen concentration” would achieve a win.
Presumably, the reason for South Africa not attaining the single-minded concentration demanded by 12th-century Japanese Buddhists was that their attention was elsewhere.

It brought to mind a withering put-down I once heard of the talented, but underperforming Pakistani cricket team: “They are more preoccupied with issues in the change room than with the state of play on the field.”
One of the change room issues apparently occupying the minds of our players was a demand for R34-million from Safa, should they win the eight-team tournament. This led sports writer Mninawa Ntloko to harrumph in Business Day that “Bafana’s shameless greed and blatant opportunism” could prove to be “the team’s undoing.”
Whether their backdown from this “ransom attempt”, or opening-night nerves, or some other malady explained our disappointing loss of mojo is not known.
But, whatever perils await the Iraqi team back home, the advantage of post-Saddam Iraq is that their soccer team does not have to reckon with Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic elder son, Uday.

Apparently, a performance not to his liking could result in torture sessions, which included “ritual head-shavings”, “punching and slapping”, “sessions of kicking a concrete ball”, and “fitness work-outs that lasted 12 hours”.
But the international spotlight now shining on South Africa for the Confederations Cup has encouraged other sectors to ventilate their demands, and use the tournament as leverage to enforce them.

This week, the beleaguered and leaderless SABC was threatened by its unions with a blackout of Confed match coverage unless pay demands in excess of 12% were met.
Quite how the national broadcaster — R800-million in the red and seeking a taxpayer-funded bailout of R2-billion — intends to even pay its proffered 8.5% increase is an accounting mystery, a little like the creative book-keeping of our newly enthroned Ponzi king, Barry Tannenbaum.
A union official put the blackmail in straightforward terms: “No agreement, no Confederations Cup. .. a complete blackout.”
Doubtless, the cash will be stumped up, and the tournament will be televised.
Another no-show at the tournament was the much-anticipated Rea Vaya, the first phase of the bus rapid transport system.
The plug was pulled due to an election promise of President Jacob Zuma. Undoubtedly, its on-time introduction during the cup would have unleashed taxi mayhem on the streets.

Whatever the merits of the so-called Bafana “mercenaries” and other bandwagon climbers, the world of soccer is actually dominated by stupendous amounts of money. Three days before the Confed kickoff, Real Madrid set a world record when it paid £80-million for Manchester United’s Portuguese winger, Cristiano Ronaldo — making Bafana’s pay claim look like peanuts.
And this signing came just days after the club had paid £58-million to acquire Kaka, now on display here for Brazil, from AC Milan.
Those two transfers approximate half of the R4-billion national sports budget of South Africa.

Interestingly, Real Madrid was described by soccer writer Simon Kuper as “a populist democracy”. Its recently returned president, Florentino Perez, was elected by the club’s 70000 members.

The club, rather like a country, has no shareholders, only members. As Kuper explained, “he bought Ronaldo to please them”.
As I was totting up the revenue figures of Real and the other nine richest soccer clubs, all European (I arrived at the total of € 2.5 -billion), I came across a report stating that the world’s leading hunger fighter, the United Nations World Food Programme, had less than € 1.1-billion in its budget, and was obliged to slash its programmes and, among other cuts, suspend food distribution to 600000 seriously hungry people in northern Uganda.
As the old banking advert used to say, “It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

*Published Sunday Times 21 June 2009

Case for serious reflection in a dangerous season for justice

AFTER last Saturday’s M-Net-Via Africa literary prize I found myself in the unexpected position of participating in a post-award interview.
Trying to match the occasion with some book knowledge, I did no better than invoke the character of Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He spoke of things “which are worth the fighting for”.

In the dying hours of the constitutional negotiations, back in November 1993 at Kempton Park, I led the fight-back against a National Party-African National Congress deal that would have empowered the president and his cabinet to have effectively hand-picked their own Constitutional Court. The minuscule Democratic Party, sidelined on many other key issues, managed to win this battle.
My efforts to provide a Judicial Service Commission to act as a filter between the executive and appointments to the highest court in the land drew both cynicism and praise.

Both the cynicism and excessive praise were overblown. I just reckoned then, as now, that without an independent constitutional court which owed fealty to the constitution, not to the government, SA’s brave new democratic world would be stillborn.

Reading the criticism and concern which greeted the unprecedented adjournment of the first meeting of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) since the election, I thought perhaps another of Hemingway’s aphorisms applied to the body on whose establishment I had expended so much energy all those years ago. He used the phrase “beautiful fatalism” to describe people “who stay loyal to a doomed cause”. Are the causes of judicial independence, and the JSC as a vehicle to ensure it, doomed?
Certainly the JSC has been knocked all over the legal ballpark recently. It has made a meal and, the South Gauteng High Court suggests, a hash of investigating complaints of misconduct against Cape Judge President John Hlophe.
On the appointments front, new Justice Minister Jeff Radebe prevailed, on a majority vote, to postpone proceedings, in part, he said, to allow him meaningful input on the question of the transformation of the judiciary, “with regard to race and gender representivity”.

Actually, inside one of the documents that members, including Radebe, received for the meeting, was an appendix baldly entitled “Demographics”. Here, in detailed racial arithmetic, was the result of the JSC’s handiwork on the transformation front over the past 15 years. At the commencement of the new constitutional order, 97% of all judges were white men. According to the JSC document, today 54% of the country’s judiciary are black, and 27,2% are female. To widen the pool of women appointees, the JSC has inaugurated a special training programme targeting women practitioners. In terms of race, the JSC has ensured that 87% of the nominees it proposed for high court positions in the past year were black.

But such progress, impelled in part by the constitutional requirement that the judiciary “reflect broadly the racial and gender composition of SA”, is quite insufficient for the taste of the Black Lawyers Association. According to their document, which was attached in support of one of the candidates up for consideration, nothing short of full-scale proportional representation will suffice: “The judiciary, and therefore the JSC, cannot pretend that it is proper that justice should be meted out to the majority black population by a majority white judiciary, or a marginally black majority bench.”

Strangely , there was no document before the JSC that dealt with any of the violations we have witnessed over the past few months of section 165(3) of the constitution, which provides that “no person or organ of state may interfere with the functioning of the courts”. No doubt a vast file could be filled with threats made against the judiciary in recent times .

Last weekend, Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille warned against reducing the judiciary to puppets of the ruling party. Doubtless, Radebe will have regard for this concern. He should also use the period of reflection he has arranged to consider how best to balance the sometimes competing claims of diversity and competence. Supreme Court of Appeal Judge Carole Lewis last year drew attention to inexperienced high court judges meting out “horrifying convictions and acquittals where judges had simply not understood the fundamental rules of evidence or criminal law”.
I suspect most South Africans, of all stripes, would rather appear before a judge, of any colour, who could competently apply the rule of law, without prejudice, and hold the ring for them against the mightiest forces in the land.
That is, indeed, “worth the fighting for”.

*Published 19 June in Business Day

Lesson to be learnt is that humility trumps hubris

Last week provided a study in contrasts between the use and exercise of power, at home and abroad.
In President Jacob Zuma’s rural redoubt of Nkandla, it was easy to be blind-sided by reports of black economic empowerment bling, relating to the helicopters and flashy cars that transported the ascendant elite to the head of state’s home village thanksgiving.
But Zuma’s speech was not aimed at the ostentatious. It suggested a sense of someone, who, whatever his past and future failings, remains absolutely rooted and secure in his identity and mindful of the communal ladders which lifted him to prominence.
Zuma assured his audience: “I will never forget my origins ... even as president, I will not change. I will still listen to you and do whatever you tell me to do ... Even if I live in a big house. You will tell me if I do wrong.”
Nkandla, in other words, will provide Zuma with the moral compass for his presidency.
My wife, Michal, who practises as an executive coach, drew my attention to a vast range of literature which differentiates between “external” or “hard” power and emotional intelligence, conveyed by “internal” or “soft” power. Most political leaders follow the first route, believing that the externalities of power, detached from emotion, are the ticket to leadership.
Yet, the more effective form of leadership often originates from your internal power: your own sense of identity based on the strength derived from your personal relationships and your ability to recognise, and manage, your emotions — and to empathise with others.
That’s a pretty tall order. But someone else whose soft power was on conspicuous display last week, in the cauldron of the Middle East, was US President Barack Obama. His masterful speech at Cairo University resulted in a standing ovation — no mean feat given that his immediate predecessor, George W Bush, on his last visit to the Middle East, had a pair of shoes thrown at him.
In place of the Bush rhetoric, made vivid with the formula “you’re either for us or with the terrorists”, Obama managed to draw on his own multicultural background, and his middle name “Hussein”, to navigate through the multiple minefields of Middle East politics.
The usually staid Financial Times exalted Obama for reaffirming his country’s “unbreakable” bond with Israel and for recognising the “intolerable” plight of the Palestinians. Obama “dodged the ambushes, without evading the issues”.
But it was another paragraph in the superpower leader’s speech, which caught my attention. He reached back to the words of President Thomas Jefferson: “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”
Of course, as one critic noted, the eloquence of action is more powerful than the eloquence of rhetoric. But the speech did provide a refreshing start to what is hopefully a new chapter in US-Middle East relations.
However, across the oceans, in London, Gordon Brown’s premiership appeared to be in a political death spiral.
Last weekend, as Zuma celebrated and Obama basked in his warm Egyptian reception, Brown faced up to the loss of six senior cabinet colleagues, and the slump of the governing Labour Party to third place in the European elections.
Compounding Brown’s misfortunes was the leaking, last weekend, of e-mails penned 18 months ago by the past master of the dark arts of political intrigue, Lord Peter Mandelson. In the hasty reshuffle of the cabinet, he effectively became Brown’s deputy prime minister.
Yet, when marooned behind the front line of British politics, Mandelson had cast doubts on his leader’s mental hygiene, describing him as “insecure”, “complex”, “self-conscious” and “angry”.
In Mandelson’s view, Brown “tries too hard to be a normal person”. But perhaps Brown is onto something.
Former British politician, and one-time neurological registrar, David Owen, has diagnosed a condition to which too many political leaders are prone.
In a recent book The Hubris of Power, he suggests — drawing on his observations of Bush and Blair, and framing them around the invasion of Iraq — that something happens to the mental stability of some leaders while in power.
He suggests that hubristic behaviour is an occupational hazard of high office. Exacerbated by isolation and deference, it can lead to patterns of reckless behaviour, bad judgment calls and a tendency to see the world as an arena in which the leader can exercise power, based on “a delusional sense of personal infallibility and divine exemption from political accountability.”
Let’s hope, for our sake (and the world’s), that Zuma and Obama remain grounded.
They could do worse than to follow, with the necessary updates, the Roman example.
Wise emperors apparently placed a slave behind them on their chariots. His purpose was to whisper: “Remember, you are only human.”

*Published in Sunday Times 14 June 2009