Brian Bacon: After Mandela it’s time for new generation of leaders

The second lesson is that in leadership, character is always more important than strategy.

Even with one of the world’s most courageous and charismatic leaders at the helm, it takes more than a single generation to move the majority of a population from poverty to middle class. To transform a nation (or any large enterprise for that matter), inspiring leaders – who accept absolute personal responsibility for transforming themselves, their work, their community and the nation – are needed at every level.

Nearly 20 years after the end of the brutal and racist apartheid regime, South Africa’s citizens are still searching for a new leadership model to carry forward Mandela’s ideals amid a host of mounting problems, including rampant government corruption, an unemployment rate nearing 40 percent, poor public education and high rates of poverty and HIV and Aids.

These challenges won’t be solved by lofty top-down leadership, however inspiring.

Although he is revered today (and rightly so) as the most important leader of the anti-apartheid struggle, I doubt Mandela will be remembered in history as a great transformer, simply because he failed to deliver social and economic rights to the majority of the people.

Many studies show that black South Africans are actually worse off economically now than they were under apartheid. The rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. For all of his great successes, what Nelson Mandela failed to do was to develop leaders around him who were as big morally, or even bigger than he was. His legacy will be tainted by the culture of greed and corruption rampant within the ANC at most levels today. Mandela can’t be blamed directly for that culture, but he can be criticised for not speaking out as senior ANC figures enriched themselves at the expense of the poorest in South Africa.

Like Mandela, other great, charismatic leaders of the last century such as Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King can inspire us to towering heights personally, but they do not provide us with a useful template for institutional transformation.

When their time was up their institutions became less, not more. The most important legacy of a great leader is to leave behind even greater leaders who take the institution to the next level.

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander in the first Gulf War, once defined leadership as a potent combination of strategy and character but, he said, if you ever have to be without one, be without the strategy.

This could certainly be applied to Nelson Mandela. His towering character often made up for some rather dodgy (to say the least) strategic choices like open support, for example, of Libya’s ruthless and eccentric autocrat Muammar Gaddafi and his indecisiveness in dealing with 
his ex-wife Winnie, one of the most controversial people of our time and who was eventually charged with 18 crimes including murder, kidnapping, and torture.

Such dubious strategies and decisions could easily have led to Mandela’s political undoing and fall from grace, but his strength of character as a leader more than made up for these lapses of judgment.

Mandela’s resolve and character as a leader emerged early during his school years. His anti-apartheid convictions resulted in continuous strife with school authorities.

Despite consistent misdemeanours he made it into law school, was called to the bar and went on to establish the most successful black law firm in South Africa.

Eventually, he would serve 26 years hard labour. In his later years in prison – he was finally released in 1990 – he was offered his freedom if he would renounce his commitment to armed struggle. He refused.

Mandela’s qualities and impact as a leader are indisputable. He was courageous and resolute. He was the pattern breaker. His character and visionary actions, stamina and resilience were profound. Yet, his most enduring legacy will not be the things he did, but what he didn’t do.

He refused to succumb to the seductive pull of revenge and the politics of hatred that infected large parts of the anti-apartheid movement.

As a consequence, South Africa was saved from a grizzly civil war that would have torn the nation apart. That will be his greatest legacy.

Yet, individual qualities, 
skills and exemplary character in a leader, however exceptional, are never enough to transform 
a nation, nor any large institution.

Mandela played his role magnificently and we can learn great lessons from his life, but now it’s time for a new generation of leaders to emerge.

This is not only true for South Africa, it is true everywhere.

• Brian Bacon is chairman and founder of Oxford Leadership Academy. For more information visit www.oxfordleadership.com or tweet to @OXFORDLeader