Leadership and Ethics in Higher Education 143Understandably there are some voices in South Africa who have
been advocating African values in leadership. Reuel Khoza^5 is probably
the main proponent of African values in leadership. Sometimes, this is
articulated under the umbrella of Ubuntu meaning a philosophy of life,
sometimes ethical values, that are drawn from traditional African
culture. Besides Archbishop Tutu^6 who had been promoting this from
his earlier years as a scholar of African Christian Theology, Ubuntu
found its way into the Post-amble of the Interim Constitution of the
Republic of South Africa (1993), and consequently became the ratio
decidendi for our earlier judgments in the courts of our country.
The problem, though with the concept, Ubuntu is that it has become
rather nebulous, a referent for all things that may sound vaguely good. It
transpires that for many people who articulate it, Ubuntu refers to some
distant ideal that makes us feel good but that there is no danger of it
might becoming applicable today, otherwise its demands could be
unbearable and onerous. This is the reason, Nigerian philosopher
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze^7 has declared that Ubuntu is both “not
enough” and “too much”. This is what he says:
“Ubuntu is too much because... as an ideology it relies too much
on the extraordinary: luck, miracles and an ambiguous concept
of natural goodness. Ubuntu is not enough because it fails to
supplement – or one might say, to moderate – its innate optimism5
Vide Let Africa Lead: African Transformational Leadership for the 21st
Century Business (2006); and Attuned Leadership: African Humanism as
Compass 6 (2012); Penguin.
See Battle M: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu in Hulley L,
Kretschmar L & Pato LL: Archbishop Tutu: prophetic Witness in South Africa;
1996, Human & Rousseau, 93ff. On a more detailed treatment of the philosophy
of Ubuntu see Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi magadla (Editors): UBUNTU:
Curating the Archive, 2014; UKZN Press, Scottville, and Munyaradzi Felix
Murove (Editor): African Ethics: An Anthology of Comparative and Applied
Ethics, 2009; UKZN Press, Scottville. 7
Reason, Memory and Politics, 2008, Unisa Press, at 111 and 114.