I RECENTLY RETURNED from a two-week journey to South Africa, where a Government of National Unity took office 30 years after Nelson Mandela became that country’s first democratically elected president. Here in America, none of us needs to be reminded that our democracy, now in its 248th year, is struggling mightily – some might say on life support. What might we possibly learn from one another?
It’s all about governance. Both countries – South Africa and the United States – are blessed with incredible natural and physical assets and resources, including an abundance of land and people, plus a deeply troubled and still-unresolved history with apartheid and slavery. Both countries have the capacity to be economically prosperous and socially just. But both are failing to deliver on their promise, largely due to ineffective, corrupt or dysfunctional government and poor governance.
Both began with great promise and inspiring leaders – George Wahington and Nelson Mandela – but both lately have succumbed to partisan bickering and political polarization. While both countries face daunting challenges, both possess the assets needed to address these issues, including strong and resilient people and a generally optimistic, can-do culture.
What, then, is the key to reversing the trajectory both countries are on? With due respect to James Carville and his clever coinage that helped drive Bill Clinton’s winning campaign in 1992, it’s not the economy, stupid! Rather, it’s time for competent, honest, and courageous leadership, stupid!
The Government of National Unity in South Africa is not a panacea, but it certainly represents a healthy mid-course correction to the corruption and incompetence that has ravaged the country over the last 15 years, leading to the highest income inequality, the highest youth unemployment, and among the highest crime rates in the world. It may be more of a coalition than a true Government of National Unity, but it sure beats the paralysis and polarization we now face in our nation’s capital. Maybe we can learn a thing or two about former adversaries becoming allies, or at least listening to one another and trying to find middle ground that respects policy differences while promoting the public interest.
Leadership matters. After spending 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela invited his jailer to his presidential inauguration. As he wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom: “People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”
Mandela’s ANC recently has betrayed his legacy, only underscoring how rare and invaluable it is to have leaders who are both courageous and magnanimous. We in America owe so much to leaders who took us through adversity with strength and conviction – immortals like Lincoln during the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression and the Second World War, and the Rev. Martin Luther King during the battle for civil rights. Both countries were literally saved by leaders with purpose and talent and a capacity for helping to adhere to our “better angels” and move closer to that great arc of justice. Does anyone really believe that our current choices for president represent the kind of leadership the moment deserves and demands?
It’s always darkest before the dawn, but there is daylight on the horizon. Even in the heart of the most extreme poverty in the slums of Soweto, ripples of hope shine brightly. With others, I experienced the joy and love and energy of the Kliptown Youth Program, which provides uniforms, hot meals, afterschool tutoring, and inspiring cultural activities to literally thousands of young children who live next door in shacks without running water.
In downtown Johannesburg, we experienced a private university where tuition is $11 a month, where every student is required to start an entrepreneurial venture, and where 95 percent of its graduates find meaningful employment. As one of my colleagues observed: a tsunami of hope!
Similarly, a comprehensive program for homeless people in Cape Town measures its success in transforming lives with demanding metrics and through powerful and uplifting innovations. Just as we in America benefit from a healthy, diverse and purpose-driven nonprofit sector — what de Tocqueville described as voluntary associations and which he considered America’s most important differentiating strength – South African social entrepreneurs are building the foundations for a caring civil society.
Indeed, one of the most successful nonprofit initiatives launched in Boston nearly 40 years ago, City Year, now thrives in Johannesburg and represents the potential for a national movement for voluntary community service that might become a vehicle for genuine, multi-racial nation building.
When Nelson Mandela was finally freed from prison, one of the first cities he visited outside of South Africa was Boston. He came here 34 years ago to express his thanks and gratitude to the citizens of the Commonwealth for being the very first in the nation to ban state pension funds from being invested in apartheid South Africa. Some 250,00 Bostonians crowded the Esplanade as Mandela sang and danced with joy. I remember it as possibly Boston’s best day in recent memory.
A further thread connecting Boston and South African can be found in a famous speech delivered by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Cape Town in 1966. It was written by Richard Goodwin from Brookline, and included this now-famous line: “Each time a [person] stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, [they] send forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
The young student leader from Cape Town who invited Kennedy there was Margaret Marshall, who subsequently moved to Boston and became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and the eventual author of the Goodridge decision, which legalized same-sex marriage in the state — and changed the world.
South Africa and America, and South Africa and Boston especially, have much that ties us together in what Martin Luther King called, in his letter from a Birmingham jail, an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” We need to continue to learn from one another and strengthen the ties that bind us as imperfect unions and struggling democracies.
Ira A. Jackson is a co-founder of the Civic Action Project and a research fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, where his research project, The Frontier State, is exploring how and why Massachusetts became the Silicon Valley of life sciences and what lessons that could offer to emerging industries such as climate tech, and in addressing social problems such as closing the racial wealth gap and providing quality, affordable early childhood education. He recently was part of a delegation visiting South Africa led by the Ripples of Hope Foundation.
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