Deja vu! We have been here before! Prince Mashele has revived his now famous brand of vicious elitism, (Sowetan 23 February 2015 Jacob Zuma: Fit to be a herdsman, not a President).
In this anachronistic prism, only those who had seen the face of a teacher or lecturer are fit to govern or have any intellectual or leadership import. Were this any plausible, governments and countries would be run from college and university libraries.
Mashele resuscitates his old tired critique, more like a diss in the hip hop language, an infantile ridicule that President Jacob Zuma is not fit to govern purely because of lack of formal education. At another time in the same publication, Sowetan, he called the President a ruralitarian, whatever that is, given that Mashele also arrived in Gauteng from a rural village in Limpopo.
South Africa and the world have long come to appreciate the President as a self-taught, tried-and-tested organic intellectual whose lack of formal education has never been a hindrance in his life. But that is clearly difficult for Mashele to accept.
Mashele's precise words are: "His party, the ANC, elevated him to its highest office, regardless of his well-known moral and intellectual shortcomings." Mashele has become adept at saying the same thing in different ways. In essence, he is arguing that the leadership of society must be determined by the level of education.
We have already disabused Mashele of the notion that for one to be a leader one must have gone through tertiary education or possess formal qualifications and pointed out that such notion is elitist and flawed. It is also a tired perspective resurrected by President Zuma's opponents when they run out of arguments.