It’s tempting to think that because we took the 2024 Rugby Championship, and defeated the 2021 British Lions, and won two successive World Cups in 2019 and 2023, we have the best rugby players in the world. Well, that’s true, up to a point — in some positions we arguably do, such as Eben Etzebeth at lock, Malcolm Marx at hooker, prop Ox Nché and our two brilliant wingers, Cheslin Kolbe and Kurt-Lee Arendse.
But that’s not why the Boks are doing so well. It is about leadership of the kind that goes beyond inspirational team talks. Coach Rassie Erasmus has said: “We can beat countries more powerful and richer than ours if we stand together and use all our resources.” And captain Siya Kolisi believes “people expect the kind of performance that you put on because they know of the things we’ve been through and what the country has been through”.
These statements by the Springbok leadership are not occasional or random. They reflect these men’s consistency and authenticity, and their deliberate decision to dedicate the Springbok team’s endeavours to a higher purpose beyond the sports field. It is about service, healing, transformation, unification — and, let’s admit it, about making everyone feel good.
He built dedication and enthusiasm among Sars employees, many of whom could have left for more money in the private sector
How wonderful it would be if such an attitude informed the government’s approach to serving the people who elected it. And there are signs that it is not impossible. Under the new minister of home affairs, the DA’s Leon Schreiber, that department seems energised, responsive and demonstrably more efficient. Schreiber announced recently that within one month, the backlog of 247,500 ID applications was “completely eradicated”. He describes this as “yet more tangible proof that long-standing challenges at home affairs can be resolved when we work in a systematic and focused manner”.
Schreiber has not hired an entire new corps of officials. His success seems to confirm what anyone who has visited public facilities such as hospitals can see, if they look carefully at what is happening. Clerks, doctors and nurses often try their best, but they have to deal with outdated or broken IT systems, X-ray machines that fail or are simply not there, lifts that do not work, broken toilets, and interruptions in water and electricity supply. These are problems of management, not medicine.
Public servants at the coalface could also be forgiven for being frustrated at the lack of support from higher up, where the priority often seems to be spending money on policy conferences, awards banquets and fancy vehicles with expensive and entirely unnecessary blue-light brigades.
It is possible to inspire civil servants. The late Pravin Gordhan turned the South African Revenue Service (Sars) from a loathed and inefficient monolith into the most effective entity in the government, and one of the best revenue collection agencies in the world. Like Erasmus and Kolisi, he did it by explicitly appealing to a sense of higher purpose. He built dedication and enthusiasm among Sars employees, many of whom could have left for more money in the private sector. He drew respect and trust from previously resentful companies and individuals. It was an emphatic achievement, undermined later only by the determined corruption of the state capture project.
The Springboks consciously play for the whole South Africa. Government ministers, MECs and directors-general need to start thinking and acting like that, instead of playing only for themselves.
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