A Leader, a Leader… a Leader for our Kingdom.
On Saturday 1 January, #pennySparrow was about to sit down for lunch but before doing so decided it was fitting to make a horrendously racist Facebook status update. By Monday morning the South African internet was ablaze in response.
#pennySparrow has been trending on Twitter for 2 days, everyone is really upset. I spent the day watching everyone from regular citizens to Jawitz properties compete to see who could build the biggest wood pile to burn her on.
To add fuel to the fire, someone screenshot’ed a previous Facebook post of #pennySparrow proudly supporting Mmusi Maimane, of the Democratic Alliance, as her choice for the leader of her province. Suddenly South Africa’s official opposition had the country’s biggest pariah squatting on their brand.
To be clear, #pennySparrow is a pariah — she represents a constituency of people with a corrupted understanding of human dignity. Welcome to South Africa, we are still a dysfunctional society. If someone wants to put their hand up to lead, step one is acknowledging the problem before leading us out of it.
The DA and Mmusi Maimane had to respond — even though #pennySparrow is a nobody, she had become a national issue — a comment was required after her DA allegiance went public.
At this point, a leader has a few options:
- Don’t respond — Ignore the issue, hope it goes away.
- Respond — unleash your fury, open a criminal case against the perpetrator.
- Respond — Lead, use your obvious, documented influence to educate her and the constituency she represents.
The DA’s response was exactly like everyone else’s response. Seemingly the risk of appearing sympathetic or soft won out over the opportunity to lead — to send a delegation to #pennySparrow, to allow Mmusi to pour coals of shame on her head, highlight her appalling view of black South Africans and then to present her publicly as an ashamed, apologetic but rehabilitated member of society. It could have been a positive moment in the restoration of her posse of abhorrent racist white South Africans.
To lead a country is to lead an array of people — some good, some bad, some racist. Moments like these are opportunities. There are plenty of people willing and able to tweet in their anger — less who are able to remove themselves from the mob, put the country’s long term future as the priority and lead us to a better place.
I don’t feel like there was any evidence of leadership in South Africa in the last 48 hours — populist politics was the order of the day.
