Sadly, when Africa yearned for true leadership of the continent, it got this South Africa!

It all started with the presidency of the late Nelson Mandela. How does one describe this presidency in terms of African leadership?

'Useless' - as some have said - is perhaps harsh. However, you cannot fail to have seen the beginnings of a state actively running away from power and leadership of the African continent.

Apologetic about power, and inebriated with the opium of Consensus fed him by a new world he neither understood nor could understand, Mandela began the sad steps of rolling back a South Africa which at that time already stood in a pivotal position of leadership, into the ordinariness South Africa has become today. Mandela gave up the political leverage of nuclear capability without so much as a whimper. Black Africa - such as it is, and as expected - had accepted it couldn't handle such sophisticated technology responsibly. Africa is the only race in the entire world today not to have its hands on nuclear technology (weapons).

Then came the presidency of Thabo Mbeki.

Here we encounter the lethal combination of juvenile vandalism and unbridled ambition! And what a cock-tail of a toxic oxymoron. Perhaps what makes the Mbeki presidency dangerous isn't so much the taut points of his yoked presidency - which came snapping spectacularly in in the drama of his summary dismissal - but from where his presidency drew inspiration.

Yes, you guessed right. From Mugabe and Zimbabwe!

Mbeki will forever deny that he tried to build a Xhosanostra state modelled on Zimbabwe which Mugabe and his retinue of bullies have marketed to the world - and to Mbeki's South Africa - as a Shona State. Mbeki swallowed Zimbabwe's crazy idea hook, line and sinker, and, using State resources - particularly the security services, in the name of his now defunct Scorpions - tried to build himself into a second Mugabe of the continent. Thankfully, the ANC, not being what Zanu-PF is, blocked Mbeki on all fronts and at all attempts. Mbeki will go down in South Africa's history as someone who tried - thankfully unsuccessfully - to amend the ANC constitution to suit himself.

South Africa as a rendition of a CIO state - at which Mbeki sat at the apex as a king presiding over a Xhosa kingdom - came to a screeching halt. With Mbeki's failure, Mugabe is a true emperor without clothes in the region.
The loss of internal purpose beyond self under Mbeki - at its extreme epitomised in the appointment of the recently deceased Jackie Selebi as South Africa's Police Commissioner - quickly manifested itself in the spirited but totally mistaken foreign policy positions and actions of the Mbeki regime on various issues at international fora, and on Zimbabwe in particular.

Too small to be South Africa's president at such a critical transformative time, never having understood power above detail, unable to dismount the ideological over-clothes of a past long dead and gone that he continued to wear, totally lacking in perceptive politics required of a ruler of a State such as South Africa in the present world, and unable to rise above the petty personal, Mbeki accelerated many-fold the decline of South Africa as a world power with the same speed and drama that accompanied his own downfall later on. Mbeki's "I am an African" speech only betrayed an ideologue who should never have been placed anywhere near statecraft at that particular stage in the history of South Africa.

Today - thanks largely to Mbeki - in political terms, South Africa is a Zimbabwenized state. In political party terms, the ANC has been Zanunized.
In economic terms, South Africa is held back by a mediocrity that should never hold it back, given that now South Africa's economic arteries are now drawing from the open wells of the world markets. In social and personal security terms, South Africa is a living nightmare. Forget the shopping malls and gated communities, elsewhere, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Zimbabwe or some such other badly governed and politically oppressed African country.

And by the time we get to the Zuma presidency … what can one say in terms of foreign policy?

While it is difficult to let rip on Zuma as one does of Mbeki - because Zuma is an incumbent president - one is also unable to ignore the length of entertainment and shortness of substance and seriousness in South Africa today. The alleged corruption is largely famed than true. True and sophisticated corruption belongs to regime before Zuma's, and the Selebi affair was only a tip of it.

But what cannot be denied about the Zuma foreign policy is that everything is all over the place. Mbeki could at least claim the ideological straightjacket as something. Zuma would struggle to claim even a frame for his. And it goes deeper.

In other words, for Mbeki's vandalism with South African power, you can point to Zuma's nonchalance. Disinterest, even! To say Zuma is reckless hardly does justice. His, is active absenteeism. And where Mbeki sought to intellectually re-invent power he already had, Zuma might be seen as trying to 'book-keep' power he no longer has. The ordinarisation - that is, the Africanization of South Africa - is something that should shame all three South African presidents (should have in the case of the now deceased Mandela).

South Africa never had - and does not have - any business joining the rest of Africa in making its citizens the laughing stock of the world, as is now surely the case. South Africa had - and has - a moral obligation to reject the brotherhood of failure, and had a duty to uplift the rest of Africa through the deployment of its positive power.

At the heart of South Africa's policy failures is Zimbabwe. By the time South Africa sojourns to Burundi, South Sudan, Central African Republic, DRC etc, it is already seen as a bully in oversize combat, seeking political relevance in weakened or failed states when it fails to deal decisively with the enforced rot wrought by its delinquent geriatric north of the Limpopo River.

Thanks to all these three South African presidents, today the African economy is a world stereotype: of a sweat back-swamp of raw materials. African politics, a drama of dark tribes beheading each other with machetes. And tribalism has entered South Africa via Zimbabwe. And the African person, an Ebola-struck and wound-infested mob drinking together with cattle and game from bacteria-infested wells.

And let no one make others laugh by suggesting that Africa - and now with 'mighty' South Africa at its centre - can solve its own problems. You need to look no further than Kenya and Zimbabwe with their recent 'unity governments' to see how democracy has become a panel-beating exercise of political 'bush mechanics', led by South Africa. It's now 'patch-and-go', for African politics. No informing, underlying purpose beyond that cursed word - 'solidarity'. As for other crises, see what AIDS and Ebola have made South Africa look like!

And where inside the South African state does this failure lie?
Here, you encounter a South African irony, which on the face of it seems to contradict the thesis of this article. But is doesn't. The explanation of South Africa's policy failures lies in the make-up of the South African man (and woman) - call it character, personality, DNA or whatever you will. It is here where we must start in trying to untangle South Africa's monumental policy failures.

Here, one has to claim poetic (writer's) licence. South Africa - or South Africans - are pompous people. They act big. They act rich. They pretend to live large. It's a trait that goes back perhaps a century, to the founding of Johannesburg as iJozi.  But below all this, are a people and persons worn down by poverty and other social afflictions that affect the whole of Africa.
Now, transfer that to the South African state on the world stage.

Here you encounter a state - with its feet on a floater - stretching full body over water to try and reach a cookie jar from which the owners of the jar, clearly visible, are eating. Ok, this is a poor imagery but readers can hopefully still see the point.

Instead of South Africa - as a State - building concrete pillars below its feet, and then the strong tools to reach the cookie jar, South Africa does none of that. For South Africa, it is everything for it to think that it can miraculously elongate itself and reach the cookie jar somehow.

South Africa - better still South Africans - with their big egos, are not the sort of people who would accept that power lies in the small to the big, bigger and biggest, and not vice versa. No, South Africa, has got to be just there, be seen to be there - 'big' - with the big guys. South Africa is - in South Africa's eyes, a world-stage player.
Or, is it?

The irony is therefore that in appearing - and wishing to be bigger than it is - South Africa has become even smaller.

In ignoring Zimbabwe - or rather - in dealing with Zimbabwe benevolently rather than in solidarity with the long-suffering and poor of Zimbabwe - and the tribally persecuted Ndebele - South Africa has exposed all its inadequacies as a potential power. If you have no sense of justice - or the appearance of it as a potential power - then you have failed. South Africa's policy on Zimbabwe is not that it is arrogant or sneering, it is downright contemptuous of and superior to the people of Zimbabwe - and the Ndebele in particular.

Zimbabwe's failures of today, are South Africa's nightmares of tomorrow building in the horizon.  What goes around comes around. It is good times to South Africa now but having Africanized South Africa, South Africa must be sure it has the tools to deal with African problems within its borders when they hit. And South Africa has allowed the seeds of those problems to stalk its political edifice.

South Africa needed - and still needs - to build itself up as a strong State first. But to do so, it needed - and needs - to look, not look inwards, but outwards, in its immediate backwater, Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, because Zimbabwe is and remains the political vandal in the region, the trouble-maker. Lesotho is on a different dimension.

The Zimbabwe malaise that South Africa has let simmer on and on - to this day - has now entered South Africa big time. Increasingly, South Africa is no longer a state for growth and power, but has become just another African country pre-occupied with managing internal crises and fire-fighting social discontent - from xenophobia to everything else.

Of course, South Africa being South Africa, has totally inverted its priorities.

Instead of trying to play big as an economic giant - through expansion into Africa and other economies, to regional and international blocks like the so-called BRICS (Heaven knows what South Africa is doing there!) - South Africa should have concentrated on building a strong state to leverage its economic power. And South Africa had all the examples it needed to learn from at its disposal - from America to Japan, Britain to Germany. All these states first and foremost built themselves into powerful states before they became powerful economic actors. Looking at all these states, which state immediately around them can be said to threaten any of them, militarily or by political upheaval? The answer is none. Invariably, therefore, the economic is a function of the political. And yes, it's the politics, stupid!

Zimbabwe continues to wreak havoc on South Africa and the region generally. Zimbabwe even shamelessly holds meetings with neighbouring countries to look after its own citizens it has driven from home (Zimbabwe citizens, that is). South Africa continues to watch with frightening and misplaced political largesse.

South Africa's policy failures can also be said to be at the confluence of a split political personality, where the South African personality meets or collides with the Zimbabwean personality.

Where South Africans are pompous, Zimbabweans are screamingly vain. Easily given to self-made superlatives about their own achievements, Zimbabweans easily scream that they are the best in the world in everything - and actually believe it - despite all evidence to the contrary. And long mentally damaged by the ideology - a useless relic of their 'pungwe' nghts during their war years - Zimbabweans are the sort who actually believe that, even in international politics, they can repeat a lie into a truth. Witness the empty chest-beating across virtually everything, made even louder by the hollowness of emptiness.

And they scream so much - and a Zimbabwean voice is by nature shrill and raspy - that you can't ignore them. That is why, even today when they have failed as a state - and have their country virtually run for them by others - they still scream right into your ear-drum to tell you that all of this is actually success.

And before those angry rejoinders start pouring in, let it be said that the term 'Zimbabwean' is being used for convenience here. Everybody knows the unstated differences - broadly speaking.

Confronted with this noisy northern neighbour, South Africa being South Africa, did not stop to listen and separate noise from substance. Or to try and separate cries of desperation from noisy claims of political relevance. South Africa conflated the two categories.

So, instead of seeing a madman and walking away from him, South Africa saw a serious man to be taken seriously and thus joined with the madman. The political damage made on South Africa by Zimbabwe is going to be long and deep - and therefore enduring.

It can be summarised that South Africa's policy failure in Africa is down to a simple fact.

South Africa failed to know that power and leadership are good if deployed to the good, but that you need to have them in the first place to exercise them. But even more important, South Africa has never understood that, in addition, when you have power, you may need to be a responsible bully from time to time. The US does it for the world, and every other great power does it. Africa - when it needs this responsible bully - has none. Instead, - despite the howls of derision alleging imperialism etc from African countries - Africa still invites America and the West to be good bullies for us. The examples are too numerous to mention.  

Because of this power vacuum created by a politically naïve South Africa, today Africa is every race's playground. Even Asians and the Chinese now find better-ness at Africa's expense. White children, some as young as 21 years old, go around the length and breadth of Africa, teaching our 80 year-old mothers and grandmothers about sex - which they call sexual health - when Africans with proper African leadership - can do the same, and even achieve better, by doing things in a manner that is sensitive to African values of Ubuntu.

Africa does not need the noise of solidarity. It desperately needs the voice of power.

Consensus and solidarity in the hands of the weak are dangerous hypnosis. But in the hands of the powerful, they are responsibility. South Africa long gave up responsibility in 1994.
 
But how sad!
And if you thought this article was bashing South Africa needlessly, then let us see what you have to say when you get to know that today, one Robert Mugabe - a drooling, evil nonagenarian - and a genocidaire whose hands are dripping with the blood of the Ndebele - has been put at the helm of the continental body - the African Union - with the full and active support of South Africa!