I was recently privileged to be invited to be part of a panel discussing “The Courage to be Unpopular: Leadership in Complex Times“. As Judy Sikuza, CEO of The Mandela Rhodes Foundation and the panel chair put it in a brief, the conversation would be about “the challenges of making leadership decisions under circumstances of complexity – where there is no completely right or wrong answer and all outcomes are trade-offs.” This panel was one of the events part of the 20 Year celebration of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. The other panelists were MRF Trustee Janet Jabiru, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, Professor Anna Vignoles, and Mozisha Founder, Dr. Kene Ikebuaku. Some of the thoughts I shared on the panel are part of the genesis of this post. Leadership being a topic I am passionate about, I have included broader reflections that were triggered by the discussions and events of that weekend of celebration. So…here goes!
Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease begins with a tragedy. For those who may not know, it is the sequel to Things Fall Apart, and it is about Okonkwo’s grandson. As I paged through the masterpiece, I found myself hoping, negotiating, pleading for a different ending. I begged and wrestled with the author until the last page. I lost. The author won. The end of the story is the very beginning of the book. But then it got me thinking: would knowing how it ends help us change so we can have a different ending?
Looking around the world we live in today, my answer is no. No matter which context I look at, it seems to me that we humans are good at ignoring the obvious, and even better at remaining blind to history, and masters of switching off common sense. I mean we all. But the truth is that more often than not, we actually know how it ends!
Look at corruption. Most people involved in corruption probably shouted “corruption is bad” at some point in their life. And we know how it ends: benefit for few, tragedy for many. Serendipitously, when I mentioned ‘Corruption! We know how it ends!’ at the MRF Gala Dinner during the panel discussion, lights went off! The punctual load-shedding hand put the hall with 400 guests in darkness, panelists' microphones silenced! I wish I could claim the credit for the visual and sound effects! That was courtesy of Eskom!
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Inequality? What inequality? Yet we know what it is, and we know how it ends. It might be slow, but it eventually surely comes. When the critical mass is reached, a revolt is inevitable. Then destruction all around, and everyone loses the lot or the little they had. Because nothing can stop an angry human with nothing to lose and part of a dissenting mob.
Being Rwandan, I remain fascinated by revelations about the recent history of that beautiful country, including the 1994 Genocide against Tutsis and moderate Hutus I had the misfortune of witnessing in person at age thirteen (I shared my experiences in the book Witnessing). Records have now been made public that US intelligence services knew much more and briefed political masters of what was happening and what was coming. At some point, briefings on Rwanda, as Rory Carroll of The Guardian reports, were almost on a daily basis. But somehow, whatever number they estimated to be the potential death toll was acceptable to them. Not enough to get any superpowers or the UN’s intervention. Bill Clinton’s administration would later say they didn’t fully appreciate the scale of the tragedy. But archives show otherwise. Not that it was America’s responsibility to save Rwandans. After all, it was our own leaders who got us in the mess.
I have no doubt that whoever ordered the infamous shooting of the presidential plane now considered to be ‘the matchstick’ that lit up the ‘powder keg’ knew what would follow. It had happened so often in Rwanda that political killings were followed by deadly chaos. The bigger the political figure, the more destruction there was. And so going all the way to the top and killing the president had only one outcome. Perhaps they, whomever they are, thought they could contain it. Or they were prepared to live with the consequences. Well…hell descended. Unabated. Paul Kagame himself, the current President of Rwanda, is on record for opposing an intervention force from the international community, although some might join him in arguing that it would have been too little too late, while others may think that he was simply a rebel leader smelling a certain victory he would have wanted no one to interfere with. And we know how that one ends. An estimated million died in Rwanda, and subsequently, many more - Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis - died in the then Zaïre, current Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). But the Rwandan-born conflict didn’t end there.
Rwanda crossed over to the DRC. In the late 90s, Zimbabwe decided to enter the fray. Joined by Angola, Namibia and Chad on one side, fighting against Rwanda and Uganda on the other, the players of what would later be dubbed Africa’s World War were in place. Strangely, the beginning of the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy coincides with this costly intervention, in which some argue Mugabe successfully stopped Kagame from capturing the Democratic Republic of Congo for a second time. At what cost?
Barack Obama, when asked what his biggest mistake of his presidency was, he answered: “Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in invading Libya.” Well, how about thinking that he could plan for it in the first place? But Obama is not the only global leader who didn’t plan for the ‘day after’. In Libya, he was in it with France. Speaking of France, the pattern of chaos in their former colonies only indicates that something is the same. And wrong. Now consider Bush and Blair in Iraq, citing discovery of weapons of mass destruction that were nowhere as a justification. Trump then Biden on handling Afghanistan, especially at the end, handing over the country back to the Taliban.
Of course, I am omitting here analysis on reasons and supposed reasons given for these conflicts, some more reasonable than others. In these examples however, there are many other interests involved, most of which are never in the news or even in any paper trails. But something seems strikingly common here: an attempt to impose a system of beliefs on another society. The hubris involved in thinking that a superpower can obliterate the core of a society and its leadership, and then somehow, conjure up a way to get all the minds in that same society to behave exactly as they want so it can be moulded into what they want (in this case, a democratic order) is astounding. Yet, great minds - yes, respected great minds - as well intended as they may be, seem blind to it. Somehow, there is a part of us all that thinks things will end differently from what history, and even our gut feel, says. If it is not hubris, it is much worse: intentional, for geo-political, economic and material benefit. But in the end, Life remains faithful: soon or later, the balance has to be restored, somehow. And in this process, it appears everyone loses. But we know hot it ends.
Yes, we know how it ends. Yet, we seem incapable of stopping it. Look at South Africa. It is not hard to imagine that the architects of apartheid at some point must have known how it ends. But they maintained it for decades, somehow hoping against hope that they could forever. And then it ended fairly abruptly. Then, men and women led by the ANC of Nelson Mandela took on great responsibility to lead. Yes, they steered the country away from a disastrous civil war that seemed almost inevitable. Then they took to leading toward recovery. A new dawn. Yet, as professor Njabulo S Ndebele, Chairman of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Mandela Rhodes Foundation put it at the launch of a book about the history of the MRF put it, the ingenious ways many had learnt to defy and gradually destroy the system - which was then apartheid - are still being used to defy and destroy the new system.
My opinion is that a crucial step was skipped in the process of starting a new South Africa. The enormous trauma consequent to years of deprivation, oppression and dehumanising of black people engineered by apartheid left serious scars within the makeup of the precious humans who fought it tooth and nail, many losing their lives in the process. Then it ended. But there was no time for the leaders and followers to update their ‘soulware’. Their mentality, attitude, core beliefs, thinking patterns. No time to grieve and heal. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was just a drop in the ocean. Or rather, a drop of disinfectant on a massive wound, most of which is invisible. The TRC should have been considered a beginning. Not an end in itself. Hallas, many of the leaders and future leaders of the country then had no time to take a breath and realise that the outside changed so radically that it needs an updated inside to run it. Without that, the story, the system, the players, the surroundings, all that may change, but if the wounded and scared-self remains the same, it will redefine the enemy to target, and the result will be the same: destruction. And we know how it ends. We see a series of preventable scandals but yet completely unable to stop them.
Hollowing out a power utility can only lead to one outcome: lights out. Mismanaging an airliner, ballooning its running costs well beyond industry norms can only lead to a certain wing-clipping. Once grounded, all stakeholders lose. Lack of timely and regular maintenance of infrastructure will only lead to roads exploding. In Johannesburg, literally so. And the cost of repair becomes orders of magnitude more than the cost of maintenance. Ignoring feedback about the state of basic education over years can only lead to a shrinking skilled workforce, mismatch between available jobs and skills supply, shrinking the tax base and contributing to growing youth unemployment. And we know where that leads. Unprocessed anger, amongst men in particular, will somehow find an ‘out’. Violent crime. Gender based violence. Violent protests. And so we wonder why there is so much violence? But somehow, we know.
So no. Knowing how it ends is not enough. But if not, then what is? At the very least, a leader who is self-aware would know that something within them inevitably has to die. It is not simple. It is a sort of rupture within. And this dying is unfortunately not happening enough in our world. It may be that it is not pretty. Because the process of dying for something new to be born within is often painful. At the very least unpleasant. And often lonely. Those around you may well not understand what is happening, because it signals a radical departure from established ways, leading to serious lags in understanding, and potentially creating conflict. It is not simple. But that is the single most complex decision to contend with. All others, when looking at it, only seem circumstantial. If healed, we are ready. But will we be open to the process of healing?
The main reason why it is not simple is because the very part of ourselves we need to kill in this healing process is often the one that is offering us something we want to hold onto. Be it feeling superior or simply ‘better than’, the illusion of power and control, wealth and its permanence, instant gratification, a sense of belonging, or simply that sweet thing, literally and figuratively, that we are enjoying so much that we just can’t stop tasting. And so the proverbial apple is bitten. It is very hard to kill something we believe we are benefiting from. And yet, without this kind of death and birth within, we know how it ends.
It is not Kagame on Rwanda, Mugabe on Zimbabwe, Obama on Libya, Bush and Blair on Iraq, Mandela, Rhodes, Gaddafi, Zuma, Verwoerd, Thatcher or Stockton Rush on Titan or Thando, John, Gatera, John or Jacques. You may be raising your eyebrows wondering why on earth I would put these names in the same ‘WhatsApp group’. Well, it is because we all are. The kind of blindness that we suffer from is not unique to these human beings, nor are the moments they managed to conquer that evil within. The impact of it differs perhaps only in how many people get to hear of it, and the legacy narrative will only depend on who is telling the story for what purpose. But there are triumphs and disasters alike. It is not them alone. It is you and I. In this way, we are all the same. And yes, even when we know how it ends, we seem to have a thing that prevents us from changing enough so we can stop it.
So yes. Before we get to a situation where we have to choose between a hundred or a million dying, what we do with our inner being determines how we will behave when that moment comes. But it is rare that we will get to that kind of choice without our involvement in the process that got us there in the first place. Involvement that perhaps could have led to a different kind of choice to make. And hopefully one where we don’t have to rely on the hidden belief that we can control other human beings.
Fortunately, we also have enough evidence that we can learn to die, so we can be reborn. And we are not short of examples. We are capable of the continuous renewal that can only happen with courage, vulnerability, determination and willingness to go through the proverbial ‘eye of the needle’. If there is a single most important and complex decision to make, it is this one: to die to self so a new self can be born. And then, if knowing how it ends is not enough, we can hold onto something else: knowing how we want it to end.
