Leadership is about the country, not the party

--:--
The one lesson we can take out of the mess in the Johannesburg City Council is that leadership in local government doesn’t always come with a mayoral chain. The DA is stuck with the notion that because it's the biggest party it should also be the mayor. But that’s being in large. Leadership is something else. As the biggest party in so many vital situations the DA should understand its job as, first, to provide local government stability. It doesn’t matter who the mayor is. And it won’t always matter who the premier is and Cyril Ramaphosa has shown us it certainly doesn’t matter who the president is. “Before you are a leader,” GE CEO Jack Welch said, “success is all about growing yourself. When you are a leader, success is all about growing others.” What matters is the country.
9 May English South Africa News Commentary · Politics

Other recent episodes

Execrable English or Cunning Code?

The General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill is an attempt to rewrite what South Africa’s national interest it. On a first read it turn out to be almost exactly the government interests as well. So opposing government policy, advocating for it to fail or funding legal challenges to literally anything the…
20 Sep 15 min

Cyril Ramaphosa's sweet dreams

President Cyril Ramaphosa told the country on television on Sunday night that the recent Brics summit in Johannesburg was all about creating “a fairer and more inclusive world order”. New World Orders are the stuff the Russian and Chinese leaders dream about. To hear them slip so easily from a…
6 Sep 13 min

Honeyed tongues and hearts of gall

The Brics summit in Johannesburg last week has left a simmering argument among South Africans in its wake. Was it a good thing or bad. Who have we become involved with and does it even matter? For some the Brics summit represented an historic turning point but most proponents of…
30 Aug 16 min

When will BRICS actually do something?

The Brics summit in Johannesburg this week is a giant talk shop. Go back to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in the late 1950s and you’ll find much of today’s grand talk about a New World Order lying, word for word, under decades of dust. So why should things…
22 Aug 17 min

Did the moon just get shot?

Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen has pulled off something of a coup by getting author, commentator and scholar William Gumede to chair his Moonshot Pact gathering of opposition party leaders in Johannesburg next week. Well done him, says Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from The Edge. People, including…
8 Aug 10 min