The old adage of ‘having big shoes to fill’ is a challenge that all leaders in South Africa have faced since Madiba and his colleagues led the country out of oppression and into democracy. What was it that made these former leaders so exceptional and how, in today’s context, can President Jacob Zuma’s government emulate those qualities? Struggle veteran and MP Professor Ben Turok says a lesson the current generation of leaders could learn from the Mandela-era leaders is subverting the need for personal gain.

“The lessons on leadership are primarily the single-minded commitment to the cause of liberation,” he says, “but coupled with this is the absolute integrity both to principles and to personal interests. The leadership of that era never engaged in financial or similar activities for personal enrichment.” He believes the exceptional qualities of the Mandela-era leadership were a product of two things: the historical context and the personalities.

He says: “These leaders were forged in struggle. They did not come into the movement with thes e qualities. The struggle required the integrity referred to. They were a product of their times but some fell by the wayside, because they did not have the stamina or the dedication necessary. In short, even ordinary people became great leaders.” Turok says the leaders of today operate in a different environment, and that the fruits of being part of a ruling party are ”there for the picking”. “This can be quite easy and, as a result, the same values are not fostered to the same degree. This means that the ANC and government has to constantly reinforce the requirements of integrity, which is no easy matter.”

For the Mandela-era leadership, events prior to the liberation of South Africa had already tested their ability to make wise decisions – especially in the case of Oliver Tambo, who had become the unofficial international ambassador of the struggle in South Africa, when many of his comrades were in prison. It was in this context that Tambo was once forced to make a decision between ensuring his own safety, and making a public show of support for those who had lost their lives at the hands of the apartheid forces.

The context was the funeral of 42 victims killed by members of the South African Defence Force in Lesotho in 1985. Veteran photographer Alf Kumalo, who took an iconic photograph of Tambo touching his heart at the funeral, says: “According to Adelaide (Tambo's wife), he was strongly advised by, among others Mozambican president Samora Machel, not to attend the funeral of those who died in the massacre. He could be risking his life. But he told her: ‘I am commander-in-chief of these young men, and now they are dead. How can I say I will not go to their funeral?’” Lizeka Mda, a media leader and journalist whose career has spanned pre- and post-1994 South Africa, says her father was at Fort Hare University with Oliver Tambo, and that Tambo’s ability to draw together people of different backgrounds was a trait that foretold his role in the leadership.

“My father says Tambo was very much a ‘unifier’ of students belonging to the ANC and other formations of students from both rural and urban areas,” she says. And she says on the Mandela-era government: “In leadership lecture contexts I’ve heard about humility, which seems to talk to Walter Sisulu.” According to descriptions of the Mandela-era leaders by struggle stalwart, former Gauteng MEC for safety and security, ambassador to Mozambique and ANC spokesperson Jessie Duarte, it seems it was the combination and the chemistry of those working together that made them so exceptional. Duarte, as Mandela’s personal assistant in the ANC for four years from May 1990, was privy to countless private meetings.

“It was really a combination of three people. Oliver Tambo, at the time, was the senior statesman – the world-wise leader who had experienced the international community and their needs. Madiba was the leader who had been projected as the unifier of the country, but also as the symbol of hope for the future. Walter (Sisulu) was the practical implementer, and this was the combination between the three people that was absolutely magical,” she says, adding that Sisulu was a ”practical visionary” who could see something a long way into the future and put a plan into action, and that Madiba’s exceptional quality as a leader was that he was a ”great thinker”.

“Between the two of them, there is also this absolute patriotic zest to have built South Africa into something enormous and great,” she says. When Mandela became president, and in the negotiations leading up to that moment when the country was liberated, he had to make decisions that would make or break South Africa, and he managed on most occasions to make wise decisions. Of these there were many, but two that have passed into popular memory are his decision to back South Africa at the World Cup Rugby in 1995, and his containment of the explosive mood that rocked the country after South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani’s assassination in 1993.

Madiba and Hani were extremely close, and when Madiba received the shocking news that Hani had been assassinated, his first priority, according to Duarte, was to ”make sure that the immediate family was okay”. To this end, he immediately drove to see them. What followed was a decision that plotted the course of South Africa’s future. Knowing that Hani’s death brought with it the potential for enormous violence around the country, he decided to inform the public exactly what had happened, as Hani’s killers had been arrested almost immediately after the fact. He made a public television address that asked everybody to stay calm, despite the tragic news. “That was a very wise choice,” says Duarte, “because any mystique around Chris’s death, at that time, would have sparked violence second to none. It was incredible that he had the strength to do that, because I saw him the same afternoon when he arrived, and he really had been dramatically affected by Chris’s death.”

Madiba had to make many such decisions to help move the country forward. This, says political analyst and struggle veteran Professor John Daniel, took place in the context of the reconciliation mode that they had adopted and which sometimes meant compromises had to be made. “These were all seen as necessary measures, or temporary sunset clauses, so that the process could move forward,” he says, “whereas Zuma finds himself in a very different landscape. Firstly, there is no threat from forces that want to derail the state, but secondly, the real pressure is poverty and the people want material improvement – not so much ‘change’, as simply ‘a better life’.”

Daniel says a large percentage of the population do not have the means to earn wealth in their own right, and that they look to the state to deliver for them. They can use a low level of violence, and Zuma has to respond to that,” he says. And, he adds, there are “powerful forces, like the youth league, which desire more material things”. “They don’t care about investment, economic policies to do with minorities, or anything like that. They want material gain and they want it now.” The enormous legacy of disempowerment left behind by the architects of apartheid is on a collision course with the governance of the day, and perhaps it is only when the crisis reaches critical mass that leaders with the same moral world view as Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu and others of their generation will emerge.