Executive political leadership: Why a ‘super president’ won’t fix South Africa’s problems

Successive South African presidents haven’t taken advantage of the power at their disposal, but future leaders should exercise their authority more broadly.

Craig Bailie holds a master’s degree in International Studies from Rhodes University and a certificate in Thought Leadership for Africa’s Renewal from the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute. He is an alumnus of the Futurelect Southern Africa Public Leadership Programme and the founding director of Bailie Leadership Consultancy.

On 8 May 2026, South Africa’s Constitutional Court passed a judgment declaring Parliament’s 2022 decision to reject a Section 89 independent panel report published earlier in the same year as “irrational, unconstitutional, and invalid”, opening the way to impeachment proceedings against President Cyril Ramaphosa.

That judgment brings the Phala Phala scandal to the fore again, highlighting the far cry that Ramaphosa’s executive political leadership has been from the hope he gave many South Africans, immediately after the horror that was the Zuma presidency, and during his inaugural presidential address in 2018, when, quoting Hugh Masekela’s song about “self-sacrifice, individual responsibility and the importance of personal change”, he said to Parliament and millions of South Africans watching and listening in: “Send Me.”

Without denying the injustice of apartheid South Africa, and barring the world’s elder statesman, the Phala Phala scandal raises questions about the quality of South Africa’s post-1994 executive political leadership.

Specifically, because we live in an electoral democracy, the scandal also encourages us to think about how we can get ethical and competent leaders into public office, beginning with the presidency, why this hasn’t already happened 32 years after South Africa’s first democratic elections, and what can be done to mitigate the fallout of the failure to do so.

In Super President: The History and Future of Executive Power in South Africa, a book I recently reviewed, political scientist Bhaso Ndzendze locates South Africa’s post-1994 presidential leadership at the heart of what he correctly describes as the country’s “stagnation, crisis or… decline”.

Counterintuitively, however, the author’s explanation for the state of the nation is that successive presidents haven’t taken advantage of the power at their disposal. His proposed “remedy for South Africa” is that incumbent and future presidents should also hold ministerial leadership positions in their cabinets and, by implication, exercise their power more broadly.

Relying on historical an