WeeklySA_AdminTEMPERAMENT: There is nothing wrong with a mayor defending himself against an accusation of criminality. But, there is something profoundly wrong with allowing the accusation to provoke a public meltdown, writes Themba Khumalo…
By Themba Khumalo
Few things capture the absurdity of public life quite like a mayor trading insults with a resident who is angry about being left without electricity.
The mayor is supposed to be the person in the room with enough authority to absorb the anger, enough intelligence to understand where it comes from and enough self-control not to throw it back at the people who elected him.
That is what made Dada Morero’s exchange with a Tshepisong resident on Thursday so unfortunate. The resident apparently called him a criminal, and Morero was entirely entitled to object. Nobody holding public office should be expected to smile politely while being accused of criminality.
Johannesburg does not need a mayor who can outshout an angry
resident. It needs one who can withstand the anger of a
community without becoming consumed by it…
But somewhere between defending his name and telling the resident that he was “talking shit”, the mayor surrendered the one advantage his office gave him: composure. And that is a particularly expensive thing for a politician to lose.
To his credit, Morero subsequently apologised for his conduct, accepting that his response had fallen short of what the occasion demanded.
The apology is welcome. It does not, however, make the episode insignificant. A mayor is not an ordinary citizen who can afford to be dragged into a quarrel because somebody has irritated him. He is the face of the city administration, and when he loses his temper in front of an angry community, the damage extends beyond his own dignity. It diminishes the office he occupies.
What is even more revealing is the chorus of some twisted ANC loyalists who insist that Morero should never have apologised, with some arguing that he should withdraw the apology because he was simply showing that he is a tough, no-nonsense leader who will not allow anyone to walk over him.
That is a spectacular misunderstanding of leadership. There is nothing tough about allowing somebody else’s provocation to seize control of your emotions, and nothing strong about answering an insult with another insult when you are a leader whose political survival depends on voters.
It takes considerably more strength to remain composed when somebody is deliberately testing your temper. What these defenders mistake for toughness is a spectacular collapse of emotional intelligence, dressed up in political bravado and applauded by loyalists who have confused aggression with authority.
The setting in which Morero turned his tongue into a weapon makes the episode even more troubling. This was not an argument at a braai or a squabble outside a shop. It was an electricity imbizo in a community already seething over a service-delivery crisis. Residents were there because they are unhappy, and whatever else may be true about illegal connections, vandalism, sabotage and the failure to purchase electricity, their anger did not arrive from nowhere.
City Power says 97% of customers in Tshepisong are not purchasing electricity. It has withdrawn technical restoration and maintenance services amid allegations of illegal connections, vandalism, tampering, sabotage and unlawful reconnections of infrastructure. These are serious matters, and residents cannot reasonably demand functioning infrastructure while some members of the community are helping destroy it.
There is no contradiction in acknowledging the failures of municipal service delivery while also condemning the criminal behaviour that makes the provision of those services more difficult.
But a mayor who walks into such a room should know what he is walking into.
He is walking into accumulated frustration, into people who have heard explanations before and into citizens who do not necessarily distinguish between the municipality, its utility, its politicians and the failures of the system. To them, the person standing at the microphone is the human face of an administration that is expected to make their lives work.
That does not make every accusation against Morero legitimate. It does mean that he should have anticipated the anger. That is part of the job.
The higher the office, the less freedom its occupant has to behave like an ordinary participant in an argument. A mayor cannot borrow the emotional temperature of the crowd and then complain that the room became heated. The people confronting him may be frustrated, unreasonable, provocative or even wrong, but none of those things relieves him of the responsibility to remain the adult in the room.
If a resident calls him a criminal, Morero has every right to demand that the allegation be withdrawn or substantiated. He could have dismantled it with facts. He could have challenged the man firmly enough to make the point without throwing a verbal brick through the window of his own office.
Instead, he allowed himself to be provoked into an exchange that should have been beneath him.
That is not strength. It is a failure of emotional discipline, and for a politician of Morero’s age and experience, it is difficult to excuse youthful impulsiveness. A man who has reached the executive mayoralty of Johannesburg should have learnt by now that public anger is not something to wrestle with in the mud. It is something to manage.
There is also something politically revealing about such an outburst. When politicians are under pressure, the temptation is often to turn the argument from the performance of the office to the behaviour of the person asking the question. It is a convenient escape hatch: attack the messenger, and perhaps nobody will examine the message. It becomes particularly convenient when the message is uncomfortable.
That is precisely why emotional intelligence matters in public leadership. It requires dollops of emotional intelligence to understand that the person shouting at you may be responding not only to you, but to everything your office represents: broken infrastructure, unanswered complaints, electricity bills, illegal connections, municipal bureaucracy, political promises and years of accumulated disappointment. It is the ability to recognise that beneath the immediate confrontation there may be a much larger grievance, even when the person expressing it does so badly.
Morero’s problem on Thursday was not that he objected to being insulted. It was that he allowed the insult to dictate his behaviour. The resident may have been provocative and disrespectful, but Morero is the person occupying the mayoral chair, and with that position comes a greater obligation to remain composed.
The resident was entitled to express his anger, however badly expressed it may have been; the mayor was obliged to understand that his own response would carry the weight and authority of the office he represented.
That is also why the ANC should not treat this as something that can be swept away with an apology and a shrug. Morero is reportedly one of three contenders seeking the party’s nomination for mayor ahead of the local government elections in just over two months. If he wants the ANC to entrust him with another term running Johannesburg, then temperament should be part of the examination. So should his ability to sit in a room filled with angry people, hear accusations he considers unfair, answer questions he would rather not answer and still retain enough composure to remember why he is there.
Johannesburg does not need a mayor who can outshout an angry resident. It needs one who can withstand the anger of a community without becoming consumed by it, because the mayor who allows himself to be dragged into every confrontation eventually becomes part of the problem he is supposed to solve. A city already exhausted by poor services, political infighting and public frustration does not need its leaders adding their own volatility to the mix.
Morero apologised, and that was the right thing to do. The question now is whether the ANC believes that an apology is sufficient, particularly from a politician seeking its endorsement to lead Johannesburg.
A party that speaks as often as the ANC does about renewal, discipline and ethical leadership cannot afford to treat those principles as ceremonial language, to be invoked when convenient and quietly shelved when one of its own senior figures fails the test. The mayoral office does not confer immunity from criticism, nor does it require the person occupying it to endure personal abuse without defending himself. What it does require is a level of self-command commensurate with the authority entrusted to him.
Morero had every right to reject the accusation that he was a criminal. What he did not have the luxury of doing was allowing another person’s provocation to determine the manner in which the mayor of Johannesburg responded.
That is the burden of public office. The person standing in the crowd may lose his temper, misjudge his words or allow frustration to get the better of him. The person sitting in the mayoral chair is expected to understand that he cannot afford the same indulgence.
When the pressure rises, residents are entitled to expect the man entrusted with the city’s leadership to become steadier, not more combustible.
If he cannot exercise that discipline when confronted by one angry resident in a community already furious about electricity, the uncomfortable question is whether he has the temperament required to exercise authority over a city whose problems are considerably larger, more complicated and more unforgiving.
