Leadership laboratory

Lionel Faull

They came to Grahamstown from all over Africa — from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Gabon, Zambia, Zim — and from all over South Africa, too. Thirty-seven bright young things — all alumni of the coveted Mandela Rhodes Scholarship, Madiba’s intervention to create exceptional leadership capacity in Africa. They brought some pretty amazing speakers with them — Zackie Achmat was the drawcard — but the likes of Kojo Parris of the African Social Entrepreneurship Network, and Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva, of the CRL Rights Commission and former head of the Office on the Rights of the Child in the Presidency, also had interesting things to say.

Zackie kicked things off on Sunday. But not before the local Sakhuluntu Cultural Group Choir sang their little socks off to the audience’s astonished delight.

Zackie was nothing if not provocative. Speaking about the post-apartheid struggle for educational equality in SA, he said that in 1975, the apartheid state’s education expenditure allocated R500 to every white child, R106 on a coloured child and a miniscule R25 on an urban African child for their education. Under apartheid, the expenditure on a white child’s education was therefore at least 20 times more than that of an urban African child. Today the gap between fees in an African working class township school and a non-racial middle class public school is as much as 100 times more.

“I am confident that the mass of decent middle-class people who send their children to Model C schools would agree that an equitable fund should be established. Thirty percent of all school fees over R2 000 could be allocated to fixing schools, establishing libraries and training librarians, funding reading campaigns through after-school care. This tax must also include private schools.”

Calling the current situation “morally wrong and constitutionally untenable”, he challenged his audience — a blend of Mandela Rhodes Scholars, Grahamstown learners, academics and residents — to mobilise and lobby for a more equal education system in this country: “Over a decade or two, significant inequalities could be eliminated. We need to call for a reasonable fees policy based on an equity fund and to ensure its realisation within two or three years.”

Both Zackie and Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva — who spoke to the scholars on Monday — are driven by a sense of urgency — fear, even — that if South Africans do nothing to narrow the yawning gaps in society, then our constitutional democracy will crumble.

Thoko, representing the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities (CRL Rights Commission), explained that the work of the commission is to ensure that all communities in SA buy into the idea of a constitutional democracy. ‘What we don’t want is for people to say that things were better under apartheid because they used to be allowed to do such-and-such. We engage communities for whom their cultural, religious and linguistic practices exist in tension with the imperatives of our Constitution.”

The CRL Rights Commission — perhaps one of the most low-profile of SA’s Chapter Nine Constitutional bodies — is nonetheless a vital cog in the nation-building project. The CRL and the community of Mandela Rhodes Scholars have agreed to thrash out a working partnership. Possible areas of collaboration include research and dialogue.

Kojo Parris, a Guyanan who has chosen to live in SA because “it’s the best place in the world”, challenged scholars’ warm, fuzzy, selfless notions about ethical leadership — the conference’s theme.

“It would be hypocritical of me to say that I don’t want my daughter to have the best education money can buy, just because other people don’t have that opportunity,” Parris argued.

“Let me tell you a simple truth about ethical leadership — if we don’t survive to fight another day then the fight is lost. That’s why it’s OK to make sure you have what you need today in order to be able to fight again tomorrow.”

“What business doesn’t want to make a profit?” he asked. “The difference between an entrepreneur and a social entrepreneur is that the one just wants to make a profit for himself. A social entrepreneur can make a profit for himself and for others. It’s about adding social value.”

He questioned the connotations which have come to be associated with the word “profit”: “Profit is merely an excess of what you put in. And it needn’t be just money. You can still make a profit while being hands-on and meaningful.”

“Social entrepreneurship is all about using the same tools that one uses to make money — the profit motive, clever marketing, one’s own skills and knowledge — but using them to do good.”

From Zackie’s socialistic ideas to Kojo’s capitalist ones, scholars were made to think long and hard about ways in which the yawning divides in SA society might be bridged and our fragile constitutional democracy safeguarded.

Lionel Faull is completing an MA in English Literature at Rhodes University. He plans to contribute to the improvement of the standard of journalism on this continent by training and developing young African journalists. And to indulge himself by churning out biographies and novels.