Why Msholozi Is The Greatest Leader of All Time?
By Vusi Moloi © 2009
The new South African President Mr. Jacob Zuma has rewritten the pages of history as a comeback kid when he was crowned the new President of the Republic of South Africa on May 9th last week despite the many damaging stings he suffered in the fangs of the Scorpions which had threatened to paralyze his hopes of occupying the highest office in the land. Msholozi seemed bolstered by fervor of strong recuperating skills when he vowed that the struggles and sacrifices of his people would not be in vain. “Instead they shall inspire us to complete the task for which so much blood was shed, and so much hardship endured. This is a moment of renewal.” President Zuma outlining his vision as an agent of revolutionary change in pursuit of economic transformation in front of countless and spellbound dignitaries from many parts of the world including Queens, Kings, Princesses, Princes, Prime Ministers, Presidents, Ambassadors and many other world leaders who had descend upon the City of Tshwane to witness the historic event of a Zulu President taking office in the beautiful motherland South Africa. President Zuma is the first Zulu President and the fourth President since South Africa adopted a democratic rule in 1994 under the leadership of the perpetual legend President Nelson Mandela. President Zuma succeeds President Kgalema Motlhanthe who served as a caretaker President of the Republic from President Thabo Mbeki who was forced to step down as a result of an implicated political interference against Msholozi.
Jacob Zuma sworn in - from NTVKenya of Youtube
The frail looking yet highly energized Nelson Mandela was there to witness and cheer on the one who is carrying the torch of South African freedom into a better future. Zuma’s nemesis and former President Thabo Mbeki was also in attendance and Msholozi gracefully paid tribute to him in keeping with the magnanimous spirit of ubuntu which typifies an insignia of Msholozi.
President Zuma is an African intellectual mind with traditionalist Zulu roots and well versed in African praise poetry making him part of the “organic intellectuals” something he has referred to in the past when addressing African intellectuals. This fact was brilliantly demonstrated when he paid tribute to the outgoing praiseworthy President Kgalema Motlanthe. “On behalf of the nation, let me express our sincerest gratitude to President Motlanthe for patriotic service to the nation. Motlanthe! Bakone! Mmadiboka, seboka, dikgomo lebatho!” President Zuma expressing tribute to the great Batswanas of Motlanthe in a form of poetic rendition in Setswana language.
Fulfilling the ANC’s Campaign Promise
President Zuma brings a solid repertoire of skills, knowledge, experiences and a unique leadership style which promises to steer the country in the right direction in fulfillment of the ANC’s political manifesto which seeks to fast track delivery of services to the majority of the African natives who remain economically disenfranchised despite the advent of the new political dispensation in 1994. Part of the South African challenge is that South Africa’s economy remains an apartheid economy in which White South Africans enjoy easy access to the mainstay of the economy while the African natives are shut out despite the fifteen years of democracy. This in itself threatens the very framework upon which the young democratic society is pegged. Above and beyond, everything within the gutsy spirit of the African native militates against this antagonistic contradiction.
The Challenge of the Apartheid Economy
The bone of contention, which South Africa must tackle head-on, is the economic transformation and all other pressing issues associated with it like crime, the AIDS epidemic, high unemployment, extreme poverty, shortage of housing and land deprivation. The South African leaders in 1994 handed the African natives a landless revolution something not sustainable over the long term. To transform an African native from landless to landowner is a formidable yet necessary undertaking. This requires a gutsy spirit on the part of the leader to confront the intransigent White farmers who refuse to budge in terms of land distribution. Their lobbyists’ powerful influence in derailing the program of land distribution is brazenly assertive as evidenced by Mr. Mbeki’s government decision to shelve an important legislation in response to the pressures of the White lobbyists a legislation which would have advanced the cause of land distribution despite the fact that Mr. Mbeki’s Government enjoyed a two-thirds majority to do so unilaterally if it had to.
How can Zuma deal with these daring lobbyists who throw their weight around? He must take a page from another newly crowned African American President Barack Obama who introduced a set of new ground rules early on to restrain the unfettered power of the lobbyists and special interests by regulating the relationship between the US Government and the arm-twisting lobbyists because he saw the power of lobbyists as a serious threat to the success of his Presidency. Zuma has proven himself to be both a quick learner and a resilient individual with an ability to recover from setback. His cherished relationship with the electorate will give him the moral strength he needs to recharge his spiritual batteries as he chips away at the rock layer of economic apartheid. Whenever Msholozi visited poor families in the rural countryside he sometimes sat on the floor instead of taking a chair offered to him. Such humility fortifies his impressive array of diverse skills providing a good synthesis he can tap into in order to advance the long-term interests of his people. He demonstrated the same humility when he knelt in front of the perpetual legend Nelson Mandela during the inauguration which led to many teary eyes.
Intellectual Advantage of a Polygamist Background
Zuma’s polygamist background gives him an added advantage of a unique and enviable vantage point by expanding his visual field and range of problem solving skills unlike others who have gone before him. Instead of being satisfied with solving the routine issues of a subset of a single variable domain of monogamy Zuma decidedly challenged himself by raising the bar to solving the superset of polygamy effectively increasing his reach of interpretive and analytical skills in this multivariable problem domain. African polygamists are renowned for their impressive problem solving prowess in a form of people’s skills by virtue of the breadth and depth of their domain knowledge.
Those of us who study and analyze African Civilization have observed that an African polygamist carries with him a large bag of formidable skills and tools like compromise, trade-off, listening skills, charm, charisma, patience, lots of love, analysis, fairness, spontaneity, consultative skills, peacemaking skills, the ability to recover from setback and the superior skill which enables him to transmute a battleground into a playground while oozing with empathy and compassion enabling him to pay deserved tribute to his bevy of queens. Interestingly, there is something uniquely spontaneous about Msholozi including when he breaks into song and dance using his charming voice to easily win the hearts and minds of those whom he admirably treats to the artistry of his rendition.
As a result of being mindful and masterful at obviating a potential revolt by his African queens, the expert African polygamist has developed a heightened sense in the area of managing complexity and crowd dynamics and anticipating volatility with the result that this broad and deep experience has greatly increased his fluency in solving problems of unpredictable complexity. This fact is observable among other legendary polygamists like the great Nyanga Skhandule of the Limpopo Province who demonstrated these hybrid skills even though he was married to twenty seven wives and fathered more than seventy children all of whom were comfortably taken care.
Given such an intellectually and psycho-emotionally enriching background Mr. Zuma demonstrated these rare skills of peacemaking and good recovery when others had already written him off. When Zuma intervened in the destructive bloodletting between the ANC and Inkatha in the run-up to 1994, which pushed the country to the precarious brink of civil war, he stopped the bloodbath which would have robbed South Africa of democratic rule an achievement deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize in its own right. Our living legend Nelson Mandela is forever grateful to Zuma for that notable achievement a fact demonstrated by Mandela’s loyal and unwavering support for Msholozi. When sporadic skirmishes were reported in the KwaZulu Natal province during the last election campaigns the proactive and charming Zuma met with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi as well as the great King of the Zulu people King Zwelithini to ensure that the elections were conducted in a peaceful manner and yes South Africa did enjoy peaceful elections thanks to the peacemaking skills of the great Msholozi.
Transformation Stages
Many analysts fail to isolate and understand the three distinct stages of South Africa’s revolution, consolidation and empowerment, which are transforming the South African society from a White establishment system that disinherits the African natives to the one that economically empowers them. Most analysts are English of colonial descent some of whom are driven by a narrow self-serving agenda which seeks to buttress the permanence of the White establishment with its concomitant economic disenfranchisement of the African natives a good example being the Anglo American company which relocated its headquarters from South Africa to England when apartheid collapsed an unfortunate move that left South African natives feeling robbed of the wealth of their motherland. Any model that thrives at the cost of others is incredible and not sustainable over the long term. For this reason, an urgent need to agitate for a durable solution governed by reciprocal interest and mutual respect is inevitable. The majority of the colonial descendents thought that the peace and reconciliation of 1994 was the end of the road and everyone would go on with their lives. This erroneous idea was premised on a failed Zimbabwe’s model of a landless revolution. Mr. Zuma is concerned with the third stage of transformative empowerment and is irreversibly intent on liberating the economy from the tenacious claws of the vestiges of apartheid. This is what will define the success of his Presidency.
African Learning vis-à-vis English Education
A lot has been said about the distinctions between Mr. Thabo Mbeki and Mr. Jacob Zuma with respect to their academic credentials. The reasoning goes something like Mr. Thabo Mbeki who is a Sussex scholar (Master of Economics at The University of Sussex, England) commands the intellectual prowess, which Mr. Zuma lacks because he is not a graduate of Sussex or any other English institution of higher learning. Indeed Mr. Mbeki is an adept intellectual, something that greatly exhilarates me. In my book A Goodbye To My Little Troubles I write about this fact and pay deserved tribute based on his visit to Canada during the G8 conference of Kananaskis. However, the fact that Mr. Zuma lacks Western education credentials does not diminish the intellectual prowess of his own which he acquired via a multitude of African traditional learning systems. In fact he brings to the table a remarkable array of chiseled and seasoned skills and talents many of which are not possible to acquire in an English school of learning simply because those WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) institutions discount African learning systems in which Mr. Zuma and many of us were schooled.
The best way to appreciate the differences, in terms of a problem solving approach, between someone who was schooled in an English university setting vis-à-vis another who was schooled under a different African learning system of which I am a humble creation is to relate a narrative of my heated discussion with a Canadian university professor in Ottawa regarding the Canadian health care system. I had visited the professor’s home as a result of an invitation by a Spanish lady friend of mine.
To help you to appreciate Canadian universities and colleges before delving into my discussion with the professor, let me point out that Canada commands the world’s best in college and university education. NASA built a satellite known as OCO (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) at a cost of $285 million and launched it into space early this year. The satellite failed to reach orbit (possibly abducted by the angry aliens?) and the American taxpayers were left holding an empty bag. In contrast, Canada’s University of Toronto, at a cost of $300,000, had built a satellite known as CanX-2 a year earlier with the same functions and mission of the American satellite. That Canadian satellite is still orbiting the earth as I write this article not to mention the fact that this satellite was built mostly by students. My university is a participant in this satellite with its communications experiment. This is one shining example of the superiority of Canadian university college education in terms of producing brilliant men and women who serve this great country. A deserved credit belongs to the Canadian Ministry of Colleges and Universities for their stringent rules which result in high quality tertiary education.
Now that we have paid tribute to the great Canadians, we continue with the topic at hand. We had a barbecue outside the house of the professor in the yard a Canadian tradition similar to South Africa’s tradition of braai vleis. As the meat was sizzling, we got off a heated discussion on the Canadian health care system as previously mentioned. The view of the professor, contrary to mine, was that the Canadian health care system had deteriorated. I pointed out that even though the health care system had somewhat degraded as a result of extreme budgetary cuts by Ontario’s ultra rightist Premier Mike Harris resulting in long queues in many hospitals which I personally experienced, Canada’s health care system remained an enviable enterprise nonetheless.
The professor disagreed very strongly. I then asked what was the basis of the honourable professor’s argument in thinking that Canada’s health care was no longer something to be proud of? The professor cited expert opinion to which I respectfully replied by posing another question as to which was more authentic namely educated opinion or personal experience? He said educated opinion was definitely more authentic. I shot back with a fact of my own and pointed out that in fact experience was more authentic because experience is a sensory determinant whereas educated opinion is an academic construct. Experience does not lie but educated opinion can a fact understood by courts of law which prefer an eyewitness to an expert witness. An educated opinion has no emotional value and thus no direct interface with respect to the survival of the organism. It’s the experience that gets encoded by human emotions which give meaning to survival and impinge on the self-preservation of the organism. That’s because educated opinion is a layer of indirection, which in Western societies stands between a human mind and his or her natural environment and sometimes negates the very survival of the organism, a breach of the fundamental premise of living organisms.
The professor was aghast as he looked at me with a sense of disdain. He didn’t expect this line of reasoning from what appeared to him to be an unlikely intellectual sophisticate. In a Canadian society an African descendent is generally regarded as intellectually inferior. That’s because Canadian universities and colleges, like many other English universities, are packed with books and some professors who portray the Africans as subhuman. Some Canadian families, particularly the fathers (no reference to the above mentioned professor), teach their children to hate African men. The reasoning is based on two things namely (1) the English Darwinist theory of Evolution which says humans evolved out of monkeys but some races (particularly the non-English) are not fully evolved and therefore remain inferior (others who say this include George Hegel, Immanuel Kant, David Hume and more) and (2) the perceived sexual prowess of a Black man which creates the need to protect a White girl from the concomitant urges of this overpowering figure. As a result, the blood of a Black man has been spilled on this fact something considered germane to the defense of the English way of life by some. I personally know this fact because my own blood was spilled when I got attacked at night outside my apartment a fact I refer to in the above-mentioned book because those youths’ minds had been penetrated with hateful teachings towards the people of African descent a fact confirmed by the latest Canadian survey on race relations and published yesterday in the Toronto Star newspaper.
The acclaimed University of Sussex made news headlines in 2002 when its internationally renowned Professor of Natural Language Processing Dr. Geoffrey Sampson published an article where he said that Africans were intellectually inferior and that there was nothing wrong with racism. Canada’s respected University of Western Ontario Professor Jean Philippe Rushton echoed those views. In fact many respected English universities like Oxford University, Leeds University, and Edinburgh University, among others, made similar news headlines with Edinburgh University firing its Psychology Professor Chris Brand who had claimed that Black people were less intelligent than their White counterparts.
Foreign Education Not Necessarily Advantageous
Some African people have these fantastic notions that the best form of education is from an English university. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that someone is a graduate of an English institution of learning is not in itself an advantage in terms of the ability to enhance the efficacy of analyzing and solving the African domain. In fact the reverse may be the case because graduates of English institutions are intellectually wired to serve the interests of the English in a way that diminishes the non-English because of the master servant relationship model. In other words English universities inculcate a sense of disdain in the hearts and minds of the students towards African Civilization. This makes such graduates a misfit in efficaciously solving the African problem domain. Moreover, an African scholar whose education is almost exclusively acquired from an English institution of learning, develops tendencies that freeze his or her warm sentiments towards the African motherland which makes such an individual tentative in fully embracing his or her Africaness effectively undermining his or her ability to contribute positively, unambiguously and innovatively to the African motherland.
Depth and Breadth of African Knowledge
The range of desirable solutions requires an African schooled intellectual mind like President Zuma who commands the depth and breadth of the African milieu. Let me explain the meaning of depth and breadth so that you can better appreciate this in a holistic fashion.
Depth refers to the number of years in performing a certain task. If person A has been working in the fabrication of widgets for five years, then we can say person A has a depth of five years in the fabrication of specific widgets. Breadth refers to the number of different widgets fabricated over a certain length of time. If person B has been working on seven unlike widgets over a period of two years we can say person B has a depth of two years and a breadth of seven years in the fabrication of widgets. If you multiply both the depth and the breadth you get fourteen years meaning that person B has a vastly more superior experience and expertise than person A with the depth of five years even though person B has only been working on the widgets for two years. Why is that?
Primarily, the number of years does not exclusively determine the value of knowledge and experience but rather the maxima of the nature of the task determine that, a process easily established using advanced mathematical tools of calculus. If the maxima of the task are one year then even if you spend five years on it you are still one year knowledgeable out of that experience. Mr. Zuma’s exposure to a variety of teaching and learning situations over extended periods of time has resulted in the acquisition of vast knowledge and domain expertise as already demonstrated above making him the greatest leader of all time in tackling the difficult issues of stopping the bloodbath and also his current critical mission of extracting the economy from under the claws of the fire-spitting dragon of economic apartheid.
Such credible breadth and depth of knowledge and skills is a PhD material a fact vindicated by the historic University of Forte Hare, which awarded Jacob Zuma a Doctor of Philosophy degree on May 25 2001. In his acceptance speech this is what Zuma said “I cannot help but remember some of the illustrious scholars who were part of the galaxy of leaders who went through this institution, such as the former President of the ANC, Oliver Reginald Tambo, former President of the ANC and first President of a democratic South Africa, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the distinguished scholar, writer, former President of the Senate in 1994 in the Democratic South Africa and outgoing Chancellor of this University, Govan Mbeki, and Prof. ZK Matthews, a former rector of this university to name but a few.” Other intellectuals he mentioned in his speech included Mr. Andrew Masondo who was Professor of Applied Mathematics before joining the South African National Defence Force as well as Tshaka ka Chungwa, among others.
A poem I wrote in tribute The Great Msholozi follows:
“Schooled in the struggle’s page
Irrevocable cadre at young age
A natural leader by convocation
Mechanisms of natural selection
Instructed in the university of life
Like a humble soldier to serve them
Chanting umshini wami anthem”
From The Indomitable Mongoose by Vusi Moloi © 2008, Canada.
Philosophical Model of Learning
Another interesting fact about an Anglo-Saxon model of education is that a student is trained to serve an English system of racial capitalism that says that the most important interests are those of the English and others are secondary to the fact. A good example of this is the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who persuaded Mr. Robert Mugabe and Dr. Joshua Nkomo to sign the Lancaster Agreement which resulted in the independence of Zimbabwe even though there were no guarantees in the document with respect to the return of the land to its rightful owners. As I write this article Margaret Thatcher is nowhere to be seen on this issue and England has disavowed any responsibility towards Zimbabwe and the rest is a tragic history. I have already addressed these points of discussion in many of my articles like The White Establishment as well as Why The West Is Less Influential in Zimbabwe in the blog Zulumathabo on the Internet.
The English regard education as an economic utility. When you take a college or university course your Canadian friends will almost always say something like “Why are you taking the course? What are you going to do with it?” What they are really asking is: What is the economic utility of acquiring that course? The English have a utilitarian view of education vis-à-vis the Africans who regard education as a form of prestige and that’s because prestige in a traditional African society is associated with the credibility that comes as a result of contributing to the betterment of others.
An education system is designed according to the philosophical view of its architects to serve the strategic interests of that society. The African architects in a traditional African society conceived of education as a system of didactics designed to produce a stake holding contributor in the enterprise of the village. The imperative directive of this African system is to serve the collective, which in turn serves the individual. Msholozi has demonstrated this irrefutable fact in his village of Nkandla where he received the highest number of the votes more than anyone else during the last elections which swept him to power.
While an African with a high level of education and knowledge commands prestige even though he or she may not have much in terms of wealth a PhD expert in an English society is regarded as nothing if he or she does not command an economic leverage of some kind particularly if he or she is non-English. Prestige does not emanate from education and knowledge as is the case in a traditional African society but rather from economics, which explains why the elders in the English societies are thrown away when they are no longer productive towards the English economy in contrast with the traditional African society where an elderly woman is regarded as a professor emeritus who teaches the new generation about the indigenous knowledge systems. On the one hand an English system produces and prepares students to serve in a master servant relationship i.e. a non-capitalized servant worker vis-à-vis a capitalized master owner of the enterprise. On the other hand an African teaching and learning system produces and prepares a student to serve the collective where the enterprise is owned by the village. Such a worker is not a servant but a stakeholder in the enterprise of the village and together with others works the economy using a system known as letsema, which fosters cooperative economics.
Conclusion
The newly crowned President Zuma, the great Msholozi, with his vast array of problem solving skills, unique background and leadership, has opened the doors to a new era of economic transformation, which requires transforming a landless African native into a land owner, a formidable task yet a necessary undertaking. Zuma’s Presidency ensures that these pressing issues will consistently receive a well-deserved attention in keeping with the ANC’s political manifesto. President Zuma ran a brilliant campaign despite the impossible odds thrown his way and he managed to inspire the whole country. All that Msholozi has to do is run the administration like he ran his political campaign and this will fulfill the words of a song “Usiphathe kahle ngoxolo Msholozi” meaning “kindly lead us in peace the great Msholozi”
About the Author
A former South African Television Journalist, Vusi Moloi is a published author of a contextual poetry book, A Goodbye To My Little Troubles, and maintains a blog, Zulumathabo on the Internet
The new South African President Mr. Jacob Zuma has rewritten the pages of history as a comeback kid when he was crowned the new President of the Republic of South Africa on May 9th last week despite the many damaging stings he suffered in the fangs of the Scorpions which had threatened to paralyze his hopes of occupying the highest office in the land. Msholozi seemed bolstered by fervor of strong recuperating skills when he vowed that the struggles and sacrifices of his people would not be in vain. “Instead they shall inspire us to complete the task for which so much blood was shed, and so much hardship endured. This is a moment of renewal.” President Zuma outlining his vision as an agent of revolutionary change in pursuit of economic transformation in front of countless and spellbound dignitaries from many parts of the world including Queens, Kings, Princesses, Princes, Prime Ministers, Presidents, Ambassadors and many other world leaders who had descend upon the City of Tshwane to witness the historic event of a Zulu President taking office in the beautiful motherland South Africa. President Zuma is the first Zulu President and the fourth President since South Africa adopted a democratic rule in 1994 under the leadership of the perpetual legend President Nelson Mandela. President Zuma succeeds President Kgalema Motlhanthe who served as a caretaker President of the Republic from President Thabo Mbeki who was forced to step down as a result of an implicated political interference against Msholozi.
Jacob Zuma sworn in - from NTVKenya of Youtube
The frail looking yet highly energized Nelson Mandela was there to witness and cheer on the one who is carrying the torch of South African freedom into a better future. Zuma’s nemesis and former President Thabo Mbeki was also in attendance and Msholozi gracefully paid tribute to him in keeping with the magnanimous spirit of ubuntu which typifies an insignia of Msholozi.
President Zuma is an African intellectual mind with traditionalist Zulu roots and well versed in African praise poetry making him part of the “organic intellectuals” something he has referred to in the past when addressing African intellectuals. This fact was brilliantly demonstrated when he paid tribute to the outgoing praiseworthy President Kgalema Motlanthe. “On behalf of the nation, let me express our sincerest gratitude to President Motlanthe for patriotic service to the nation. Motlanthe! Bakone! Mmadiboka, seboka, dikgomo lebatho!” President Zuma expressing tribute to the great Batswanas of Motlanthe in a form of poetic rendition in Setswana language.
Fulfilling the ANC’s Campaign Promise
President Zuma brings a solid repertoire of skills, knowledge, experiences and a unique leadership style which promises to steer the country in the right direction in fulfillment of the ANC’s political manifesto which seeks to fast track delivery of services to the majority of the African natives who remain economically disenfranchised despite the advent of the new political dispensation in 1994. Part of the South African challenge is that South Africa’s economy remains an apartheid economy in which White South Africans enjoy easy access to the mainstay of the economy while the African natives are shut out despite the fifteen years of democracy. This in itself threatens the very framework upon which the young democratic society is pegged. Above and beyond, everything within the gutsy spirit of the African native militates against this antagonistic contradiction.
The Challenge of the Apartheid Economy
The bone of contention, which South Africa must tackle head-on, is the economic transformation and all other pressing issues associated with it like crime, the AIDS epidemic, high unemployment, extreme poverty, shortage of housing and land deprivation. The South African leaders in 1994 handed the African natives a landless revolution something not sustainable over the long term. To transform an African native from landless to landowner is a formidable yet necessary undertaking. This requires a gutsy spirit on the part of the leader to confront the intransigent White farmers who refuse to budge in terms of land distribution. Their lobbyists’ powerful influence in derailing the program of land distribution is brazenly assertive as evidenced by Mr. Mbeki’s government decision to shelve an important legislation in response to the pressures of the White lobbyists a legislation which would have advanced the cause of land distribution despite the fact that Mr. Mbeki’s Government enjoyed a two-thirds majority to do so unilaterally if it had to.
How can Zuma deal with these daring lobbyists who throw their weight around? He must take a page from another newly crowned African American President Barack Obama who introduced a set of new ground rules early on to restrain the unfettered power of the lobbyists and special interests by regulating the relationship between the US Government and the arm-twisting lobbyists because he saw the power of lobbyists as a serious threat to the success of his Presidency. Zuma has proven himself to be both a quick learner and a resilient individual with an ability to recover from setback. His cherished relationship with the electorate will give him the moral strength he needs to recharge his spiritual batteries as he chips away at the rock layer of economic apartheid. Whenever Msholozi visited poor families in the rural countryside he sometimes sat on the floor instead of taking a chair offered to him. Such humility fortifies his impressive array of diverse skills providing a good synthesis he can tap into in order to advance the long-term interests of his people. He demonstrated the same humility when he knelt in front of the perpetual legend Nelson Mandela during the inauguration which led to many teary eyes.
Intellectual Advantage of a Polygamist Background
Zuma’s polygamist background gives him an added advantage of a unique and enviable vantage point by expanding his visual field and range of problem solving skills unlike others who have gone before him. Instead of being satisfied with solving the routine issues of a subset of a single variable domain of monogamy Zuma decidedly challenged himself by raising the bar to solving the superset of polygamy effectively increasing his reach of interpretive and analytical skills in this multivariable problem domain. African polygamists are renowned for their impressive problem solving prowess in a form of people’s skills by virtue of the breadth and depth of their domain knowledge.
Those of us who study and analyze African Civilization have observed that an African polygamist carries with him a large bag of formidable skills and tools like compromise, trade-off, listening skills, charm, charisma, patience, lots of love, analysis, fairness, spontaneity, consultative skills, peacemaking skills, the ability to recover from setback and the superior skill which enables him to transmute a battleground into a playground while oozing with empathy and compassion enabling him to pay deserved tribute to his bevy of queens. Interestingly, there is something uniquely spontaneous about Msholozi including when he breaks into song and dance using his charming voice to easily win the hearts and minds of those whom he admirably treats to the artistry of his rendition.
As a result of being mindful and masterful at obviating a potential revolt by his African queens, the expert African polygamist has developed a heightened sense in the area of managing complexity and crowd dynamics and anticipating volatility with the result that this broad and deep experience has greatly increased his fluency in solving problems of unpredictable complexity. This fact is observable among other legendary polygamists like the great Nyanga Skhandule of the Limpopo Province who demonstrated these hybrid skills even though he was married to twenty seven wives and fathered more than seventy children all of whom were comfortably taken care.
Given such an intellectually and psycho-emotionally enriching background Mr. Zuma demonstrated these rare skills of peacemaking and good recovery when others had already written him off. When Zuma intervened in the destructive bloodletting between the ANC and Inkatha in the run-up to 1994, which pushed the country to the precarious brink of civil war, he stopped the bloodbath which would have robbed South Africa of democratic rule an achievement deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize in its own right. Our living legend Nelson Mandela is forever grateful to Zuma for that notable achievement a fact demonstrated by Mandela’s loyal and unwavering support for Msholozi. When sporadic skirmishes were reported in the KwaZulu Natal province during the last election campaigns the proactive and charming Zuma met with Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi as well as the great King of the Zulu people King Zwelithini to ensure that the elections were conducted in a peaceful manner and yes South Africa did enjoy peaceful elections thanks to the peacemaking skills of the great Msholozi.
Transformation Stages
Many analysts fail to isolate and understand the three distinct stages of South Africa’s revolution, consolidation and empowerment, which are transforming the South African society from a White establishment system that disinherits the African natives to the one that economically empowers them. Most analysts are English of colonial descent some of whom are driven by a narrow self-serving agenda which seeks to buttress the permanence of the White establishment with its concomitant economic disenfranchisement of the African natives a good example being the Anglo American company which relocated its headquarters from South Africa to England when apartheid collapsed an unfortunate move that left South African natives feeling robbed of the wealth of their motherland. Any model that thrives at the cost of others is incredible and not sustainable over the long term. For this reason, an urgent need to agitate for a durable solution governed by reciprocal interest and mutual respect is inevitable. The majority of the colonial descendents thought that the peace and reconciliation of 1994 was the end of the road and everyone would go on with their lives. This erroneous idea was premised on a failed Zimbabwe’s model of a landless revolution. Mr. Zuma is concerned with the third stage of transformative empowerment and is irreversibly intent on liberating the economy from the tenacious claws of the vestiges of apartheid. This is what will define the success of his Presidency.
African Learning vis-à-vis English Education
A lot has been said about the distinctions between Mr. Thabo Mbeki and Mr. Jacob Zuma with respect to their academic credentials. The reasoning goes something like Mr. Thabo Mbeki who is a Sussex scholar (Master of Economics at The University of Sussex, England) commands the intellectual prowess, which Mr. Zuma lacks because he is not a graduate of Sussex or any other English institution of higher learning. Indeed Mr. Mbeki is an adept intellectual, something that greatly exhilarates me. In my book A Goodbye To My Little Troubles I write about this fact and pay deserved tribute based on his visit to Canada during the G8 conference of Kananaskis. However, the fact that Mr. Zuma lacks Western education credentials does not diminish the intellectual prowess of his own which he acquired via a multitude of African traditional learning systems. In fact he brings to the table a remarkable array of chiseled and seasoned skills and talents many of which are not possible to acquire in an English school of learning simply because those WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) institutions discount African learning systems in which Mr. Zuma and many of us were schooled.
The best way to appreciate the differences, in terms of a problem solving approach, between someone who was schooled in an English university setting vis-à-vis another who was schooled under a different African learning system of which I am a humble creation is to relate a narrative of my heated discussion with a Canadian university professor in Ottawa regarding the Canadian health care system. I had visited the professor’s home as a result of an invitation by a Spanish lady friend of mine.
To help you to appreciate Canadian universities and colleges before delving into my discussion with the professor, let me point out that Canada commands the world’s best in college and university education. NASA built a satellite known as OCO (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) at a cost of $285 million and launched it into space early this year. The satellite failed to reach orbit (possibly abducted by the angry aliens?) and the American taxpayers were left holding an empty bag. In contrast, Canada’s University of Toronto, at a cost of $300,000, had built a satellite known as CanX-2 a year earlier with the same functions and mission of the American satellite. That Canadian satellite is still orbiting the earth as I write this article not to mention the fact that this satellite was built mostly by students. My university is a participant in this satellite with its communications experiment. This is one shining example of the superiority of Canadian university college education in terms of producing brilliant men and women who serve this great country. A deserved credit belongs to the Canadian Ministry of Colleges and Universities for their stringent rules which result in high quality tertiary education.
Now that we have paid tribute to the great Canadians, we continue with the topic at hand. We had a barbecue outside the house of the professor in the yard a Canadian tradition similar to South Africa’s tradition of braai vleis. As the meat was sizzling, we got off a heated discussion on the Canadian health care system as previously mentioned. The view of the professor, contrary to mine, was that the Canadian health care system had deteriorated. I pointed out that even though the health care system had somewhat degraded as a result of extreme budgetary cuts by Ontario’s ultra rightist Premier Mike Harris resulting in long queues in many hospitals which I personally experienced, Canada’s health care system remained an enviable enterprise nonetheless.
The professor disagreed very strongly. I then asked what was the basis of the honourable professor’s argument in thinking that Canada’s health care was no longer something to be proud of? The professor cited expert opinion to which I respectfully replied by posing another question as to which was more authentic namely educated opinion or personal experience? He said educated opinion was definitely more authentic. I shot back with a fact of my own and pointed out that in fact experience was more authentic because experience is a sensory determinant whereas educated opinion is an academic construct. Experience does not lie but educated opinion can a fact understood by courts of law which prefer an eyewitness to an expert witness. An educated opinion has no emotional value and thus no direct interface with respect to the survival of the organism. It’s the experience that gets encoded by human emotions which give meaning to survival and impinge on the self-preservation of the organism. That’s because educated opinion is a layer of indirection, which in Western societies stands between a human mind and his or her natural environment and sometimes negates the very survival of the organism, a breach of the fundamental premise of living organisms.
The professor was aghast as he looked at me with a sense of disdain. He didn’t expect this line of reasoning from what appeared to him to be an unlikely intellectual sophisticate. In a Canadian society an African descendent is generally regarded as intellectually inferior. That’s because Canadian universities and colleges, like many other English universities, are packed with books and some professors who portray the Africans as subhuman. Some Canadian families, particularly the fathers (no reference to the above mentioned professor), teach their children to hate African men. The reasoning is based on two things namely (1) the English Darwinist theory of Evolution which says humans evolved out of monkeys but some races (particularly the non-English) are not fully evolved and therefore remain inferior (others who say this include George Hegel, Immanuel Kant, David Hume and more) and (2) the perceived sexual prowess of a Black man which creates the need to protect a White girl from the concomitant urges of this overpowering figure. As a result, the blood of a Black man has been spilled on this fact something considered germane to the defense of the English way of life by some. I personally know this fact because my own blood was spilled when I got attacked at night outside my apartment a fact I refer to in the above-mentioned book because those youths’ minds had been penetrated with hateful teachings towards the people of African descent a fact confirmed by the latest Canadian survey on race relations and published yesterday in the Toronto Star newspaper.
The acclaimed University of Sussex made news headlines in 2002 when its internationally renowned Professor of Natural Language Processing Dr. Geoffrey Sampson published an article where he said that Africans were intellectually inferior and that there was nothing wrong with racism. Canada’s respected University of Western Ontario Professor Jean Philippe Rushton echoed those views. In fact many respected English universities like Oxford University, Leeds University, and Edinburgh University, among others, made similar news headlines with Edinburgh University firing its Psychology Professor Chris Brand who had claimed that Black people were less intelligent than their White counterparts.
Foreign Education Not Necessarily Advantageous
Some African people have these fantastic notions that the best form of education is from an English university. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that someone is a graduate of an English institution of learning is not in itself an advantage in terms of the ability to enhance the efficacy of analyzing and solving the African domain. In fact the reverse may be the case because graduates of English institutions are intellectually wired to serve the interests of the English in a way that diminishes the non-English because of the master servant relationship model. In other words English universities inculcate a sense of disdain in the hearts and minds of the students towards African Civilization. This makes such graduates a misfit in efficaciously solving the African problem domain. Moreover, an African scholar whose education is almost exclusively acquired from an English institution of learning, develops tendencies that freeze his or her warm sentiments towards the African motherland which makes such an individual tentative in fully embracing his or her Africaness effectively undermining his or her ability to contribute positively, unambiguously and innovatively to the African motherland.
Depth and Breadth of African Knowledge
The range of desirable solutions requires an African schooled intellectual mind like President Zuma who commands the depth and breadth of the African milieu. Let me explain the meaning of depth and breadth so that you can better appreciate this in a holistic fashion.
Depth refers to the number of years in performing a certain task. If person A has been working in the fabrication of widgets for five years, then we can say person A has a depth of five years in the fabrication of specific widgets. Breadth refers to the number of different widgets fabricated over a certain length of time. If person B has been working on seven unlike widgets over a period of two years we can say person B has a depth of two years and a breadth of seven years in the fabrication of widgets. If you multiply both the depth and the breadth you get fourteen years meaning that person B has a vastly more superior experience and expertise than person A with the depth of five years even though person B has only been working on the widgets for two years. Why is that?
Primarily, the number of years does not exclusively determine the value of knowledge and experience but rather the maxima of the nature of the task determine that, a process easily established using advanced mathematical tools of calculus. If the maxima of the task are one year then even if you spend five years on it you are still one year knowledgeable out of that experience. Mr. Zuma’s exposure to a variety of teaching and learning situations over extended periods of time has resulted in the acquisition of vast knowledge and domain expertise as already demonstrated above making him the greatest leader of all time in tackling the difficult issues of stopping the bloodbath and also his current critical mission of extracting the economy from under the claws of the fire-spitting dragon of economic apartheid.
Such credible breadth and depth of knowledge and skills is a PhD material a fact vindicated by the historic University of Forte Hare, which awarded Jacob Zuma a Doctor of Philosophy degree on May 25 2001. In his acceptance speech this is what Zuma said “I cannot help but remember some of the illustrious scholars who were part of the galaxy of leaders who went through this institution, such as the former President of the ANC, Oliver Reginald Tambo, former President of the ANC and first President of a democratic South Africa, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, the distinguished scholar, writer, former President of the Senate in 1994 in the Democratic South Africa and outgoing Chancellor of this University, Govan Mbeki, and Prof. ZK Matthews, a former rector of this university to name but a few.” Other intellectuals he mentioned in his speech included Mr. Andrew Masondo who was Professor of Applied Mathematics before joining the South African National Defence Force as well as Tshaka ka Chungwa, among others.
A poem I wrote in tribute The Great Msholozi follows:
“Schooled in the struggle’s page
Irrevocable cadre at young age
A natural leader by convocation
Mechanisms of natural selection
Instructed in the university of life
Like a humble soldier to serve them
Chanting umshini wami anthem”
From The Indomitable Mongoose by Vusi Moloi © 2008, Canada.
Philosophical Model of Learning
Another interesting fact about an Anglo-Saxon model of education is that a student is trained to serve an English system of racial capitalism that says that the most important interests are those of the English and others are secondary to the fact. A good example of this is the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who persuaded Mr. Robert Mugabe and Dr. Joshua Nkomo to sign the Lancaster Agreement which resulted in the independence of Zimbabwe even though there were no guarantees in the document with respect to the return of the land to its rightful owners. As I write this article Margaret Thatcher is nowhere to be seen on this issue and England has disavowed any responsibility towards Zimbabwe and the rest is a tragic history. I have already addressed these points of discussion in many of my articles like The White Establishment as well as Why The West Is Less Influential in Zimbabwe in the blog Zulumathabo on the Internet.
The English regard education as an economic utility. When you take a college or university course your Canadian friends will almost always say something like “Why are you taking the course? What are you going to do with it?” What they are really asking is: What is the economic utility of acquiring that course? The English have a utilitarian view of education vis-à-vis the Africans who regard education as a form of prestige and that’s because prestige in a traditional African society is associated with the credibility that comes as a result of contributing to the betterment of others.
An education system is designed according to the philosophical view of its architects to serve the strategic interests of that society. The African architects in a traditional African society conceived of education as a system of didactics designed to produce a stake holding contributor in the enterprise of the village. The imperative directive of this African system is to serve the collective, which in turn serves the individual. Msholozi has demonstrated this irrefutable fact in his village of Nkandla where he received the highest number of the votes more than anyone else during the last elections which swept him to power.
While an African with a high level of education and knowledge commands prestige even though he or she may not have much in terms of wealth a PhD expert in an English society is regarded as nothing if he or she does not command an economic leverage of some kind particularly if he or she is non-English. Prestige does not emanate from education and knowledge as is the case in a traditional African society but rather from economics, which explains why the elders in the English societies are thrown away when they are no longer productive towards the English economy in contrast with the traditional African society where an elderly woman is regarded as a professor emeritus who teaches the new generation about the indigenous knowledge systems. On the one hand an English system produces and prepares students to serve in a master servant relationship i.e. a non-capitalized servant worker vis-à-vis a capitalized master owner of the enterprise. On the other hand an African teaching and learning system produces and prepares a student to serve the collective where the enterprise is owned by the village. Such a worker is not a servant but a stakeholder in the enterprise of the village and together with others works the economy using a system known as letsema, which fosters cooperative economics.
Conclusion
The newly crowned President Zuma, the great Msholozi, with his vast array of problem solving skills, unique background and leadership, has opened the doors to a new era of economic transformation, which requires transforming a landless African native into a land owner, a formidable task yet a necessary undertaking. Zuma’s Presidency ensures that these pressing issues will consistently receive a well-deserved attention in keeping with the ANC’s political manifesto. President Zuma ran a brilliant campaign despite the impossible odds thrown his way and he managed to inspire the whole country. All that Msholozi has to do is run the administration like he ran his political campaign and this will fulfill the words of a song “Usiphathe kahle ngoxolo Msholozi” meaning “kindly lead us in peace the great Msholozi”
About the Author
A former South African Television Journalist, Vusi Moloi is a published author of a contextual poetry book, A Goodbye To My Little Troubles, and maintains a blog, Zulumathabo on the Internet
Labels: Not Yet Uhuru
posted by Vusi Moloi at
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