140 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
could address the plight of the unemployed by electing governments and
for corporates to be prepared to take lesser profits. We could achieve
more by treating our fellow South Africans as fully human, men and
women of dignity who may be silent for now but who are never without
voice. The politics of our country could reflect the “decency” that our
Constitution and laws promise. That it does not happen can be
attributable to bad leadership. Besides bad leadership there is a meta-
narrative that undermines development and promotes dependency and
clientelism. The messages of “The Big Man” or the Big Party” can only
induce despondency about our political and social life. The problem we
have these days in South Africa is that governance tends to proceed in a
peripatetic fashion like a drunken sailor without direction, form or order,
and certainly without evidence of a driving, overarching, organizing
principle, or vision. The result is Leadership of diminished value.
Of course, leadership should never simply be about the lone ranger
mentality. There is not likely any longer to be anything like a messianic
leadership. That is because leadership reflects the values of the society it
comes from but with this difference: Leadership calls us to our higher
values and best possibilities, rather than to wallow with us at our most
base instincts. It is not just about popularity or approval per se. It is
rather about that capacity to be moral and to call the nation to be self-
corrective about the values it wishes to espouse, and how such values
are representative of its nature and character. Leadership is
responsibility.
I trust that, though unstated, the argument above is clear enough that
one should avoid the tendency to valorise “leadership“ as if it is a
characteristic that is fixed, and unchanging, necessary and of value of
and by itself. In the higher education environment, especially, leadership
can become the means for maintaining outmoded conventions,
oppressive ideas, and power relations over others. In particular, at higher
education leadership can be self-serving, if not it could be in the service