This last lecture of 2019 drew a full audience. Present was Archbishop Thabo Makgoba and his wife Lungi Manona, UMP Chairman of Council Professor David Mabunda, UMP Vice-Chancellor Professor Thoko Mayekiso and her management team, university staff and students.
What stood out from the lecture was Professor Joseph Diescho’s strong address on ethical and moral leadership, which left many enlightened. The Namibian- born Professor opened the lecture with the iconic words taken from a speech by the late President Nelson Mandela, which he uttered during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. The speech went as follows:
'During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.'
“President Nelson Mandela’s words signalled a new era for political leadership on the African continent. These words remind us as Africans that we need to be vain and selfish to own that language that Mandela spoke. When he spoke those words on 28 April 1964, the African people were considered less than fully human in the world.”
“For the first time, an African person rose above the bar and challenged the world with the words that he was dedicated to the values, ethics and morals that were bigger and greater and more durable than his own happiness. With that he scripted a new code of people leadership and resource on the African continent and beyond.
“German physicist Albert Einstein wrote: ‘If you don’t have in your own language a word for something that is very important, that something that is very important might very well not exist to you.’ Einstein was right. If you cannot participate in an important conversation in your own language, then you are a visitor to the conversation because you can only borrow from other people.”
“So, with his words: ‘I cherish the idea of a democratic free society in which all persons live in harmony, peace and with equal living opportunity,’ Nelson Mandela assisted us to name the new world order. Who, in 1964, being a black person, would talk about fighting black domination? The foresight, the ethicality and morality of that reasoning, no wonder Nelson Mandela became the most significant moral leader of our time and it shall remain like that for a very long time.”
Situational leadership
“Ethical leadership, moral leadership is not studied. It’s the consequence of the values that are in your bosom. It’s an expression of who you are as a human being. That is why Mandela said: ‘it’s an ideal of which I am prepared to die.’ You will recall that on the day of his release on the 11th of February 1990, a Sunday, this is not recorded by the chronicles, but it is there on the tape.
“When I introduced him at UNISA he broke down when I quoted him. Tata you said this. He read the speech that was written for him by the speechwriters of the movement, at the end of his presentations he cast his eyes on the horizon and noticed not only the size of the multitudes but the emotion that was pumping in Cape Town that late afternoon. At that moment he became human and a child again.
“You see when you are stricken with that kind of emotion, whether it be fear or excitement, you forget the language that you learned at school. That moment Tata Mandela was aware and very conscious of the crowd there, and that most of them were from overseas to cover the story, senior editors standing on rooftops and on trees. But when he regrouped with his voice shaking, and moved by the love there, he spoke in isiXhosa. That is situational leadership, power arrived in South Africa that day, he became a portrait literally and figuratively of situational leadership.”
“Ethics and Morality come from the heart and love, compassion, empathy and service. In order for us to appreciate the real essence of Mandela as a phenomenon in human civilisation, we have to locate him where he belongs in the human drama that changed the world because Mandela’s life, in all fairness, was full of drama of ethic proportions.”
“I will highlight the brevity and clarity of only four individuals. These men of history took brave risks as a consequence of their own convictions and the values that they held, challenged the status quo and changed the world to such an extent that today we can say intelligently that without them the world would not be the same, and arguably a better world.”
With great dedication, great risk, pain and suffering, they defended their cause of justice by doing the right thing, for the right reasons from the right place. The first is Jesus Christ, the second is Martin Luther King, the third Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz and the fourth is Nelson Mandela.
Conflict of Morality
“In an academic sense, morals are the acts of doing well, either in our thoughts, in our deeds and in the remembrance of what we have omitted to do. In all fineness it’s a vertical relationship, nobody has to see what you are doing to be moral, but you know yourself when it is not right. Ethics derive from etiquette, the things that you do and avoid doing so that people don’t laugh at you.
“Morality is about what we know it not right when nobody is watching you. Let me move towards some suggestions in South Africa’s dilemmas with morality. South Africa is a post conflict, post tremor society. It is very difficult to talk about morality when people are hungry. You cannot convince a child that has not eaten that they should not steal food. You eat first then you debate morals. The levels of poverty that we have to face make moral arguments illusive therefore we need to recreate the space in the manner that we like.
“The first conflict of ethics and morality is the story of our ancestor Adam in the Garden of Eden with his partner Eve. The record reveals that they were given all privileges and rights to eat whatever they wanted except from the one tree. One day, the record says, there was a snake that performed a very sophisticated Public Relations excise. The snake picked the woman.
“We need to deal with this question today, where are we in relation to our obligations towards other people in our neighbourhood? Where are we in relation to our own ethical and moral beliefs, to be better human beings to believe in something bigger, greater and more durable than our own happiness? Where are we in God’s providence of creation?
“Greed is killing Africa and everything is being eaten by a few people. We believe those who have power eat on behalf of others. South Africans we have an obligation to take this country forward while we are still alive. If we were to answer the question ‘where are we?’ honestly, we would say individually and collectively, we are naked.”
@ Story by Lisa Thabethe. Pictures Cleopatra Makhaga