Niccolo Machiavelli’s life is a sad tale of missed opportunities, betrayal and a soul-destroying attempt to appease those in charge in primitive Florence, Italy.
He wrote The Prince in 1513 as a way of guiding future kings — suggesting that achieving their aims justified the methods used, however ignoble. Life had taught him to set aside morality in order to achieve a higher goal. That goal, often, is about the ruler’s pursuit of glory and personal success rather than society’s wellbeing.
Machiavelli teaches that a leader needs to know how to act like a beast, a lion, when there’s a need to fight. At the same time, a leader needs to exhibit the qualities of a fox, seeing snares and traps from afar. Many years later, the selfish, warped logic of Machiavelli seems very much to be with us.
Even as we choose to move beyond the vicissitudes of daily life and focus on higher pursuits and nebulous though crucial leadership undertakings such as the G20, something happens that reminds us that morality can be dispensed with at great speed by modern day Machiavelli wannabes.
Take Ditsobotla municipality in the North West and the chaos that prevailed there this week. For the uninitiated, Ditsobotla is where Clover closed one of the country’s cheese-making factories due to poor service delivery, leaving many unemployed. This week, two officials were shot and injured as Olaotse Bojosinyane, a sacked municipal manager, staged a dramatic return to the municipality, supported by bodyguards and a coterie of councillors.
Bojosinyane took the decision by the municipality to fire him to court and won, but the municipality appealed. He was none too pleased. TimesLIVE reported: “Live ammunition was used [when he reinstated himself guns and all], allegedly by Bojosinyane's private guards, who shot at municipal employees and injured two. One employee sustained a gunshot [wound to] the chest and is in a critical condition in hospital, while the other [was hit in] the lower leg.”
To top it all, two council meetings were convened by different parties the following day. For most of 2022, the municipality had two mayors running the council at the same time.
Ditsobotla is akin to a decaying carcass. The question is why so many are waging so ferocious a war over it. What is clear is that the fight is not about how to restore services to the deprived communities or how to become a servant leader. The fight is about who should be at the helm, and thus able to provide benefits to members of the faction that supports them. The people, meanwhile, must sit down.
If a few officials must be shot for Bojosinyane to go back to work, why must morality and the rule of law get in the way? The end, as Machiavelli famously said, justifies the means. Ditsobotla is rightfully in the 16th century. It is the embodiment of dysfunction; a troubling tale of two mayors, two city managers and a divided council in pursuit of personal gain while the people suffer.
You must know that when people take out guns to force their way back to work it has nothing to do with their passion for service to the people
Former president Thabo Mbeki, in a foreword to the book Leadership Lessons from Books I have Read by Tshilidzi Marwala, notes: “The good leader must therefore fully internalise the concept and practice of the consent of the governed. Thus would she or he strive at all times to earn the respect and support of the constituency concerned while remaining loyal to the defined strategic objectives.”
Mbeki here reminds us of the importance of the contract between those who lead and the governed. But many deployed to lead have long forgotten the consent given them by the governed. They’ve stopped pretending to “earn the respect and support” of their constituencies. This is why, long after Clover shut its doors, there is no attempt to focus on the delivery of services.
What is sad is that while Ditsobotla may be a nondescript municipality in rural North West, its dysfunction is mirrored in many other municipalities, provinces and state-owned entities. The behaviour of leaders in Ditsobotla is visited upon us in various degrees in other municipalities. To say, for example, that Tshwane’s water woes are legendary is not merely to state a fact, it is an indictment on its leadership. The City of Joburg, too, seems to be following Tshwane’s water missteps. Under mayor Parks Tau it spent almost R10bn on infrastructure annually, boasting that this was much more than some provinces and other countries in Southern Africa were able to do. But so many mayors after Tau, the wheels seem to be coming off.
Ditsobotla may have two mayors, two city managers and convene two council meetings at once, becoming the laughing stock of the country, but many other municipalities aren’t much different. Ditsobotla tendencies, sadly, are becoming common.
You must know that when people take out guns to force their way back to work it has nothing to do with their passion for service to the people. You must know the gun-toting officials have nothing to do with earning the respect and support of the constituencies to which Mbeki referred. You can be as sure as the sun rises in the east that these ignoble pursuits mean we haven’t made much progress from those warped notions circulated by Machiavelli in 1513.
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