Executive Mayor Gayton McKenzie’s refreshing people-centered leadership style repairs some of the gravely damaged public trust in politicians

By: Attie van Nel*

The Bible narrates a fascinating story of a young shepherd, David, who took food to his brothers on the battle field. He found there a deplorable stalemate as the entire Jewish army was incapacitated in the face of a daunting enemy giant called Goliath, who has had a great time taunting and insulting the paradox which is a fearful army.

Put it a different way: everyone trained, conscripted, dressed and armed to confront the enemy was present but impotent. In uniform, according to battalion, from foot soldiers to distinguished generals were shamed by an intractable enemy force who challenged them to delegate an individual who can engage him militarily.

If Goliath was a military problem, why couldn’t the soldiers solve it? The truth is, Goliath was a leadership problem, which required new thinking and new ideas. Spears and swords would simply no longer do.

Restoring sanity fell to a shepherd, an individual whose presence on a battlefield was peculiar on the basis that he didn’t fit in. No conventional weapon, no rank, no uniform and no insight into military strategy or tactics.

The difference? David was angered at the unabated and continued humiliation of the army – and, by extension, the country – by the uncouth and demeaning ignominy of an imposing and ostensibly untouchable threat.

David possessed what no soldier had – he fumed. And he didn’t baiza for a moment. And that indignation propelled him into a position of leadership, paradoxically on a platform that he was as unknown as he was ill-suited for the task at hand. But when those who claim the credentials lacks the guts and the spine and the situational awareness, then those with a sense of occasion are compelled to step up. Even when they come from nowhere.

This story weighed heavily on me as I read the many WhatsApp statuses and other social media postings about the rapid delivery successes achieved by Mayor McKenzie in the desolate Central Karoo District Municipality. Yes, you suspected correctly, exceptional as his mayorship has been, it’s showcasing won’t be the function of journalism but is disseminated only via social media.

I told someone yesterday how naive he was to be disappointed in the orchestrated and structural silence of media houses to cover the story of the curious case of this non-politician who stepped up at the battlefield of political leadership and challenged the inertia, ineptness and general incapacity of what passes for politics in this country. Can you imagine eNCA, the Sunday Times, Daily Maverick, Mail & Guardian or Die Burger sending a media crew to the various towns in the district municipality to assess and report on the 100 day programme the mayor boldly imposed on himself? This overtly captured and ideologically-compromised media only headlines narratives that feed into black incompetence, scandal and infighting. Any different story in celebration of black excellence must be told elsewhere.

The Goliaths of pit latrine toilets, infrastructure decay, joblessness, despair and service delivery have conspired to freeze post-democratic politicians into inaction. They sit (read: sleep) on the battlefields of legislatures and Councils to confront our societal giants of building an new society with new opportunities. These problems are intractable and requires more time, is the only refrain we receive as feedback from the battlefield.

Enter a politician with no political training, no 20 years of making his way through the structures, no track record of note. And yet, this David brought that which politicians long abandoned: rage. Pure, unadulterated and undiluted anger that poverty is still pervasiv and ethnic and gender-biased, inequality has deepened and unemployment sets new records every quarter. Clearly the inexperienced novice on the political scene, he had shaken up the dull, unimaginative and lazy leadership at local government.

The solar plants are being installed. As promised. The local economic development projects are being launched. As promised. The dignity of decent sanitation is being restored. As promised. The energy and drive to eliminate red tape and increase turn-around times are being infused into a people-centred leadership ethos. As promised.

The dividend? Hope is back from the grave where it went to die violently, courtesy of broken promises and inept leadership.

Nothing changed in the Central Karoo except the leadership of its district municipality. No gold was discovered there that may explain the proliferation of new opportunities, other than the gold of being angered by the squalor of the people and the compassion it instills. It’s pure gold when the people are not sold out by self-serving politicians whose fuel is not the anger that mocks the dignity of the poor but the puppet strings of who control their policy framework and set their priorities.

How many jobs were created in this 100 days? How many households have been migrated from the indignity of waiting for 2 months to receive the R350 SRD grant? How much hope has the audacity to manifest itself again?

Maybe, just maybe, the Central Karoo is sending a message to the rest of SA to look beyond conventional politicians and search for the unconventional who were not serving the same interests on whose watch all our daunting developmental problems have persisted?

A fresh breeze is blowing through the Karoo, smelling of freshly-baked bread, blowing across roads with no potholes and over the roofs of new factories. That new wind blows into the backs of people who – for the first time in years – have woken up at 6am because they have a job to get to.

And that wind blows because politicians have done so bad, lacked ideas for so long, governed in the interests of its AngloSaxon and Stellenbosch funders with such accomplishment and broke their promises with such regularity, that – certainly – the only disruption can come from those who look out of place but is exactly what’s needed.

*Attie van Nel
Entrepreneur
Social Justice Activist
Author
Social Commentator