Nelson Mandela is a devotee of African folktales, as anyone who has listened to the audio-book of his favourite fables from that genre of African literature must know.
Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball publishers, the audio-book contains a wide range of tales that are read by a matching number of narrators. While entertaining their listeners, the narrators invoke empathy for Mandela's wish to preserve Africa's rich oral literature for generations of Africans to come.
Many listeners will probably ponder which of the many folktales is Mandela's favourite. One in particular that solicits attention focuses on the praying mantis and the moon, a synopsis of which is outlined in the paragraph below:
The mantis considers the moon to be a god. It wishes to capture the moon so as to appropriate its godlike status for itself. To that it embarks on several stratagems, including lassoing the moon and trapping its reflection on the water. The mantis eventually realises that his wish for godlike status is unattainable. It settles for its more modest status. As a result mantises are found today in a praying position with their front legs raised to their chests as if in supplication.
Mandela may have had the folktale about the mantis in mind when he warned Thabo Mbeki of the dangers of hubris after he was elected unopposed as the African National Congress president in 1997. It is useful to record his advice to the triumphant Mbeki. Mandela said then: "One temptation of a leader elected unopposed is that he may use that position to settle scores with his detractors, marginalise them and, in certain case, get rid of them and surround himself with yes men and women ... I have not the slightest doubt that (Mbeki) is not going to sideline anyone."
In retrospect it is a pity that Mbeki did not listen more attentively to the sagacious Mandela.
Bearing in mind Mandela's love of, and sensitivity to, African folktales, one wonders whether Zuma might not benefit from some of the folksy verities attributed to Aesop, an African slave who lived in Ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE (Before the Contemporary Era.).
To recommend Aesop's fables to Zuma is neither to patronise him nor to underestimate his intelligence. Aesop's fable, like the biblical parables, are allegorical and contain profound truths that are as relevant to successful politicians as they are to ordinary people.
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, records that the in the 13th century .CE (Contemporary Era) the Jewish scholar Berechiha ha-Nakdan was sufficiently impressed by Aesop's Fables to write a Hebrew version of them, replete with pertinent biblical quotations. It is a further tribute to the encapsulated wisdom of Aesopian fables that an English translation of the Hebrew version was published in 1967.
Perhaps the Aesopian fable that is most pertinent to the ruling African National Congress today, and hence to Zuma as its incumbent president, is the one about the hare and the tortoise.
It concerns a race between the two, in which the hare dashes ahead and is so confident of victory that he lies down to take a nap, only to fall into a deep sleep and to awake as the tortoise is about to cross the line. The Aesopian moral is that slow and steady progress is a surer way of achieving success, than reckless haste and lack of modesty.
It arguably applies to the ANC's adoption of the controversial outcomes based system of education soon after it came to power in 1994, only to have to modify the system substantial after its first five years in power and the appointment of a new education minister in 1999.
The same holds for the ANC's cavalier dismal of warnings from the ‘old guard' at Eskom to expand the utility's capacity to generate electricity rather than to jeopardise it by decentralising the supply of coal for Eskom's power stations to "hundreds of small BEE contractors" whose coal, to quote a Centre for Development Enterprise study, was more expensive and often of a poor quality.
The indecent haste of the ANC government leads to spurts of activity and sudden slow-downs that hint at poor planning and results in a hurry-wait mode of policy implementation. It is an approach that does not take account of the often woeful lack of capacity of government departments and their equally often acute shortage of skilled and experienced personnel.
The same pattern of pressing forward imprudently and consequent confusion and stasis is evident in the criminal justice system, with the senior management in the department of safety and security scrapping specialist divisions in the police service only to establish new specialist divisions a few years later.
Having dissolved the Directorate of Special Investigations, aka the Scorpions hardly more than a year after the ANC's Polokwane national conference in December 2007, the Zuma-led ANC administration established the Directorate of Priority Crime Investigation, aka the Hawks, within weeks of taking office after the April 22 election.
The same confusing stop-go pattern is evident in these changes, even though the Hawks fall under aegis of the minister of safety and security rather than the minister of justice.
The differences are arguably less important than the similarities. Just as former president Thabo Mbeki, is alleged to have been the puppet master behind the Scorpions, so Zuma may be tempted to lean on the minister of safety and security to persuade the Hawks to pursue politically approved investigations and to ignore those that are politically inconvenient.
For these reasons Zuma might be advised to contemplate the strengths of the less flamboyant, slow moving but steadfast in purpose tortoise as against the hauteur of the fleet footed but imprudent hare.
Zuma mighty equally profitably consider Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper: in which the ant diligently collects and stores food in the summer for the winter, while the grasshopper flits away the summer without a thought about the winner to come and suffers accordingly.
Internalisation of the fable may strengthen Zuma's resistance to the lure of populism as a short route to immediate and transient popularity and, in he longer run, to hardship and disaster for all in.
Equally felicitously it may stiffen his resolve to turn a deaf ear to the siren voices of the socialist cum communist choir urging him to abandon inflation targeting and forsake the regime of fiscal prudence established by Trevor Manuel during the Mbeki presidency.
Laurence is an independent political analyst.
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