What makes a person great?

Robert Mugabe won’t leave office. Thabo Mbeki made a bid for a third term and will leave a country ravaged by inflation, high unemployment, ineptness at high levels in government and business, and erratic electricity supplies.

The Economist last week said, in the angriest editorial I can ever recall from that journal: “Can Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s lame-duck president, truly believe there is no crisis in Zimbabwe? If so, it must be concluded that there is a crisis also in South Africa — a moral one …

“If Mr Mbeki had an iota of honour or courage or sense, he could have squeezed Mr Mugabe out of power several years ago — just as South Africa’s leaders pulled the plug on the nastily bigoted Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith three decades ago …

“Most of the other leaders in Southern Africa — with a few notable exceptions, including Jacob Zuma — have been equally feeble and downright dishonest … Why should Africa as a whole be taken seriously when its leaders, on the whole, refuse to cooperate to remove such a cancer from their midst? … It is not surprising that Western taxpayers feel loath to be generous when African leaders en masse refuse to help boot out one of their most wicked colleagues.”

So clue one is this: those who lack moral courage will never be considered great.

What, then, makes a great leader or individual?

We have an acute deficit of quality in leadership at all levels not just in South Africa — a country that produced four Nobel Peace Prize winners in two decades — but also on the continent.

A few years ago, Africa was experiencing unprecedented economic growth and stability, and democracy was proliferating, but yet again the continent is stalling.

Parag Khanna, in his brilliant book released last month, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, shows how Europe has become the world’s most critical sphere of interest because it uses trade, intelligence and social policy to lever advantage rather than the antiquated big-stick approach of the United States.

Khanna suggests: “America was never all powerful only because of its military dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. Nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalisation.” He observes in words South African politicians need to heed: “Globalisation resists centralisation of any kind.”

Presidents, he suggests, should be diplomatic before dogmatic. Ideology and mantra are out; policies that are not practical, rapidly implementable and that benefit those outside your sphere of ambit will have marginal impact or fail. “What is worth having is universal first and (local or national) second … Globalisation apologises to no one; we must stay on top of it or become its victim.”

He suggests that the world that matters is the “Second World” countries where citizens are working hard to achieve — Brazil, Vietnam, Venezuela, India — and where politicians are more interested in the latest trade deal than in shouting down the press or sniping at foes.

Societies that make it today have no tolerance for ineptitude or corruption because the world is simply too fast and too competitive for time to be wasted. Little surprise, then, that no African nation features in his prediction of countries destined to succeed. And that is why we need not just to debate greatness, but also to find aspects of it in ourselves and do it.

Be more than you believe you can be. Encourage that confidence in others.

Stop worrying what others think: “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories,” were Amilcar Cabral’s words in 1965 — get out and do what you need to do. But act with compassion; don’t trash those whose views don’t coincide with yours; allow them to be. Don’t falsely talk up situations by failing to acknowledge truthfully challenges where you will stall or fail. Look at difficulties frankly and then strategise how to use them to your advantage or manage a way past them. Focus on your goals and do it.

Assassinated US president John F Kennedy said that greatness was found in those who had the courage to follow their conscience without fear, and to face the consequences.

Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, suggests: “Perhaps the greatest test of leadership comes when a leader needs to go against the passions of the day, the calls for revenge, the belief that peace is no longer possible.”

Greatness beckons when we take decisions or do things that may surprise even us: we may put the interests of others before our own, or further something we believe is just and the rewards of which we may not live to experience.

Greatness comes too in acknowledging when and if we are wrong. True courage is displayed when we recognise our error, publicly acknowledge it and work to remedy it.

US historian Barbara Tuchman, in her brilliant The March of Folly, wrote: “The power to command frequently causes failure to think … If the mind is open enough to perceive that a given policy is harming rather than serving self-interest, if we are self-confident enough to acknowledge it and wise enough to reverse it, then we will have reached the summit in the art of government.”

What are the qualities that make an individual rise above others?

We encounter greatness in our daily lives; individuals who exhibit remarkable qualities that may lead to permanent or temporary greatness. It will often be a person who has a lasting impact on us and how we choose to live our life or to select a certain path: these people are the germinators of greatness.

The exception, a friend reminded me, are those who are exemplars. We may never know their names but their silent, dedicated work in a lab or studio influences us forever. He mentioned Sir Frank Whittle, “a mild little pipe-and-slippers type who was a meticulous and dedicated engineer. His engineering skills and dogged persistence eventually saw the jet engine go into production. His was a great contribution to changing the face of the physical world, yet he was not a great personality.”

On this long list we’d have people such as Vincent van Gogh, Michelangelo, Luc d’Montagnier and many, many more.

There are two primary agents for inspiration and the creation of great individuals — they are also those most often responsible for the destruction of the individual, the source of the longest-held trauma and often permanent rage. We all know who they are: parents and teachers.

Every great person I have interviewed, whether Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Judge Richard Goldstone, Sheena Duncan or many others, has had a parent or teacher whose lessons remained with them, whose encouragement fuelled them.

My daughter had a primary-school teacher at the American International School in Buenos Aires, Mr Brown, whose impact is still felt in our household. As the children filed into class he would have the bust of a classical composer on his desk and he’d play one of the composer’s works. They’d sit with eyes closed and listen as he read to them, while the music played, about the composer or the composition. They could hear the cannons in the 1812 Overture or imagine the change of seasons in Vivaldi’s classic.

At weekends he’d host informal get-togethers with parents and pupils; we’d watch and discuss documentaries on Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time or Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Parents were encouraged to share their interests in class; I’d research great artists or artworks and works of literature or writers, or discuss apartheid or Aids. He taught our children and we learned from him; his greatness as a teacher and as an individual was incalculable.

The June 2003 Gallup Youth Survey of American teens aged 13 to 17 found that young people most admired their moms, with 11% of the tally, while 7% of teens mentioned their dads as the man they admired most. Gallup noted: “Though the greatest number of teens name their mothers or fathers, a far greater proportion don’t name anyone … it’s disconcerting to consider that so many can’t name anyone they admire at all.”

But those figures for parents are disturbingly low too.

A parent who fails a child creates a burden for generations to come.

Yet too many in our land abscond from their responsibilities.

Robert Morrell and Linda Richter, in Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa, observe that in Umlazi, Durban, for example, only 7 000 out of 67 000 people ordered by the courts to pay maintenance complied in 2002. In the same year, district courts received 372 000 complaints of maintenance default in the Durban area alone.

They noted too that 25% of children are sexually abused each year (most often by incest) and only 20% of fathers who were not married to the child’s mother at the time of the infant’s birth are in contact with their child by the time he or she reaches the age of 11.

Fathers of all socio-economic strata and race groups in South Africa are generally shocking about maintaining their offspring or spending time with them. And then, of course, there are mothers who neglect, beat and emotionally and verbally abuse their young.

No wonder we have a deficit of honourable citizens; too few parents show the requisite care to their children. Too few in positions of power care for more than their pay cheque.

If we cannot change, this nation will not. It means we each have to do more — including demanding better government.

It means accessing the greatness in you and deciding what precisely you want with your life: is what you have good enough? If not, what are you going to do to change it? Start today.