How former president Thabo Mbeki was snubbed at the funeral of his long-term friend Tito Mboweni was guaranteed to set tongues wagging.
The people who thought it wise to omit Mbeki from the speaker’s programme, against the written wishes of Mboweni, suffered from a poverty of wisdom.
Mbeki and President Cyril Ramaphosa are not the kind that send each other Christmas cards or attend each other’s birthday braais. The mandarins in charge of implementing state protocol would have thought that having a serving president and predecessor on the same programme was taboo.
Where were they when Mbeki, as president, buried his own father in Port Elizabeth in 2001, with Nelson Mandela a towering figure on the programme?
Where were they when both Mandela and Mbeki spoke at Walter Sisulu’s special funeral in 2003?
Where were they when the two gave Raymond Mhlaba a heroic state send-off in the same city a few years later?
Why does Team Ramaphosa feel so threatened by Mbeki? What is the worst he could do from the podium, besides quoting from WB Yeats and SEK Mqhayi poems to paint a picture of a floundering nation?
The absence of harmony between the Mbeki and Ramaphosa teams is just one event as South Africa lives through a transition from a generation of titans.
It epitomises a crisis aptly described by Antonio Gramsci, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Ordinary mandarins will carry the flak, when they could only be ordinary, almost by design.
We are living through a period in which the best minds of the new South Africa are departing, leaving great deeds etched in our memories.
You need only look at our football to see how broad South Africa’s leadership crisis is. What would South African football look like without giants like Kaizer Motaung and Irvin Khoza? Are there any strong leaders in their wake able to pick up the baton?
The same question applies to the business sector. Who among the current captains of industry could be counted among future legends? Scarily, is no-one coming in their wake?
We need a dialogue, not as a panacea, but as part of an attempt to contend with this phase of our leadership crisis, so that we can imagine South Africa afresh, in the context of a world different from 1942 when both Mbeki and Zuma were born
Recent political events gave us a reprieve of sorts, but we should not fool ourselves in reading our immediate future.
There is something Bantustan-like or lacking refinement about these state funerals, in which government officials swagger as though they have created sliced bread.
We have a growing list of undeserving people who will receive state funerals by virtue of being former ministers.
It’s a pity our cops and soldiers will have to march to honour someone like Des Van Rooyen, the former finance minister, when his day finally comes.
It was already awkward when the sorry figures of apartheid, like PW Botha, got state send-offs in democratic South Africa.
Jacob Zuma and the legion of ministers he appointed to execute state capture are also set for this honour.
It would be better if honours like state funerals were done on a case-by-case basis so that our nation’s flag — as a profound representation of our national being — is used to drape the mortal remains of only the best among us.
South Africa is in need of deep soul-searching, but not the kind that has been suggested in the form of a national dialogue, which deputy president Paul Mashatile this week said would be held on December 16. The idea of a national dialogue is deceptively good at first glance, but deep interrogation presents some scary scenarios. Anyway, the date alone, when serious people are looking to shut down after a long year, tells us what kind of joke the whole thing will turn out to be.
We do not need the kind of dialogues meant to clothe the Ramaphosa administration with a coherent plan, or help the ANC save face.
The government of national unity (GNU) has a strong mandate from the May 29 poll, and any notion that it can be buttressed by a national dialogue is short-sighted.
It does not help that in Mbeki’s version of the dialogue the ANC’s national democratic revolution seems to be a binding influence. He was rejected by the ANC in 2007 in favour of a jackal in sheepskin, Zuma, because there was no revolutionary ethos in the damn party to begin with.
Who in the GNU will now implement the values of that revolution to be resurrected by the planned national dialogue? Mashatile? Ramaphosa? John Steenhuisen? Gayton McKenzie? Phuleeze, man!
We need a dialogue, not as a panacea, but as part of an attempt to contend with this phase of our leadership crisis, so that we can imagine South Africa afresh, in the context of a world different from 1942 when both Mbeki and Zuma were born. Ramaphosa and his generation will be forgettable in future examinations of history if their time in office is reduced to the petty muzzling of perceived opponents instead of using this period to contribute to the soul-searching that will help South Africa long after they have left office.
• Mkokeli is the lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory.
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