Since 1994, SA has been a mixed bag of presidents and patchy institution-building

• Published date: 23 July 2021
• Author: The Conversation Richard Calland and Mabel Dzinouya Sithole

An extreme crisis like this provides the most searching examination of a political leader – a very acute form of accountability. Such a crisis can make or break a leader.

South Africa is a country that faces a crisis of leadership. Against a backdrop of a former president being jailed for contempt of court for failing to appear before a commission of inquiry probing state capture and corruption, public trust has unsurprisingly declined. This has come through in research, including studies by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC).

This implies that there is a need for a form of leadership that responds to ethical crises. In South Africa and around the world, there is a severe challenge to the “normative core” – the underlying values and ethical principles that hold a society together – as the recent devastating unrest has underlined.

This is the starting point of our chapter, Presidential Leadership and Accountability from Mandela to Ramaphosa, in a new State of the Nation publication from the HSRC.

Our conceptual approach to comparing the presidents of South Africa’s democratic era was guided by the notion of “ethical presidential leadership”. We posed questions such as: what were the principal characteristics of three of the presidents who preceded Ramaphosa (Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma)? And what are the appropriate and useful inferences for his term as head of government?

We developed a framework for assessing presidential leadership based on five criteria: constitutional fidelity, institution building, socio-economic transformation, decision-making and political judgment, and strategic vision and statecraft.

Our chapter applies the first two – constitutional fidelity and institution-building.

We found that, in the 25 years since South Africa became a democracy, there has been both impressive constitutional fidelity and egregious constitutional infidelity. There has been impressive institution-building and destabilising institutional destruction.

Thus, South Africa’s experience of presidential leadership and accountability since 1994 is a confusing and often contradictory mixture of strength and weakness, success and failure, resilience and vulnerability.

Constitutionalism and governance

South Africa is a constitutional democracy. Fundamental to its transition away from the arbitrary, authoritarian and discriminatory rule of the apartheid era was the establishment of a rules-based society. In this, executive power would have to be...