The Royal Bafokeng Nation: a Forward-Thinking Traditional Community

The Royal Bafokeng Nation: A Forward-Thinking Traditional Community

Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi, King of the Royal Bafokeng Nation

for

The Foreign Policy Centre

Houses of Parliament, London

March 16th 2010

Ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for affording me the distinct pleasure of addressing you on the topic of leadership and governance in South Africa today, and, if we have enough time, a little bit on football…

I’d like to start by putting my visit into historical context. One hundred and fifteen years ago, in 1895, three traditionalleaders traveled from southern African to London to seek the help of the British government. They were Kgosi Khama of the Bangwato people, Kgosi Bathoen of the Bangwaketse, and Kgosi Sebele of the Bakwena people. They came here to ask England’s help in stopping Cecil Rhodes from annexing their landas part of his growing empire. The delegation spent the better part of three months lobbying politicians, the public, and Queen Victoria herself to helpprotect them against the corporatization of their traditional lands, and, in particular, the marketing of alcohol to their subjects. Queen Victoria embraced the cause, and gave her blessing to the Chamberlain Settlement of November 1895, which, to quote one account written at the time, “secured the countries of Khama, Sebele and Bathoen as Bechuana islands in a Rhodesian sea.” The result? When the Bechuanaland Protectorate became independent as the Republic of Botswana in 1966, Khama, Sebele, and Bathoen were considered the nation’s founders, havinghelped to preserve the country’s autonomy from white-ruled Rhodesia and white-ruled South Africa.

Why am I describing these events of over a century ago? In part because they serve as an excellent reminder of the importance of courageous, determined, and far-sighted leadership, and in part because, as the great grandson of King Khama, I am keenly aware of how the actions of my ancestors have shaped the world I live in today.

Now, putting aside the fact that it took my great grandfather and his colleagues 20 days to travel from the interior of southern Africa to London, whereas it took me about twelve hours to get here, door to door, there are a few similarities between their journey and mine that I would like to point out.

One of the first things Khama, Sebele, and Bathoen did when they reached England was to hire a news clipping serviceto document the press coverage of their visit. Their trip was covered in one hundred thirty-five newspapers and periodicals in England, South Africa, and the United States. Without the press clippings they collected, we would know very little about their journey. As it is, you can go to Rhodes House at Oxford University, and view the entire collection. I think this was a very modern thing to do for three leaders from Africa who didn’t even speak English when they first arrived here,

Perhaps even more significant than the clever way they handled information was the era in which they undertook their journey. 1895 is considered by many to be the last year of “Pax Brittanica,” or the global calm that accompanied the height of the British Empire. The second phase of the industrial revolution, the Jameson Raid, and other events of that year ushered in a new set of forces, and by the turn of the century, the world was a completely different place. If you compare that moment to today, I believe there are some striking similarities. Between climate change, China’s rapid ascension in the world economy, and the unprecedented global flows of people, capital, and information we are witnessing, we too may be on the cusp of a new world order. Perhaps the history books will eventually identify this time as the end of “Pax Americana,” or the era of US dominance in economics and politics.

In any case, it is quite humbling to be here, trying in my own small way to build on the legacy of my Great Grandfather by grappling with world issues, and seeking solutions to the challenges of the day that will ensure peace and prosperity for my people, the Bafokeng Nation of South Africa. And that is really what traditional leadership is all about, in my view. As leaders for life, we are, by definition, concerned with the next generation, rather than the next election. We view the policy horizon in terms of hundred year cycles, not five or ten year periods. We see ourselves as accountable not only to our constituents, but to our constituents’ grandchildren. And since a career change or even retirement is not on the cards for most of us, we tend to be quite conservative when it comes to using our constituents’ resources--natural, financial, and otherwise.

If you’ll allow me, I’d now like to tell you a bit more about the Bafokeng Nation, and some of the things we’re working on to make southern Africa a prosperous and progressive place now and into the future.

Our community lies about one and a half hours west of Johannesburg in what we call the “Highveld, or the elevated plains and foothills of South Africa’s interior. The territory is 1400 square kilometers in extent, andthe population is around 300,000, although, because we are in a mining area, there is a constant flux of people moving in and out of the region. The land we own is communally administered, meaning that our people do not own their land privately, but reside on plots with 99-year leases. The Bafokeng Nation comprises 29 rural villages, all of which have basic ammenities. The economy revolves around mining, specifically platinum, chrome, and granite, and unemployment is quite high—approximately 50%. A large percentage of Bafokeng households depend on government grants. While this is not unusual in South Africa, it poses a major challenge for our long term goals as a community. We are aiming to replace the culture of dependency with a culture of economic self-sufficiency, by seeing to it that people have access to schooling, training, and opportunities to work.

We have a comprehensive development plan called Vision 2020 that targets a wide range of issues, but I wantto mention just threeareas here today: education, health, and sport.

Education tops our list of long-term planning areas. The quality of state schools in South Africa is very low by world standards, and we see this as the single-most important obstacle to enabling us to reach our goals. In the Bafokeng Nation we have elected to pioneer and implement our own solutions to some of the most pressing issues, partnering wherever possible with the Department of Education. I established the Royal Bafokeng Institute in 2007 to serve as our main education reform agency. The Institute is currently focused on improving school management, in the form of principals and school governing bodies; enhancing academic programs; and involving the community in school reform, through leadership and school nutrition programs. We have built an independent school to model and incubate best practices in the region, and we’re hoping to convince others that good education is about committed principals, teachers, and communities, not about huge endowments or state-of-the-art technology.

Our second major priority is health. HIV/AIDS is a serious problem for us, and we’re working at different levels—prevention, treatment, and care—to combat the disease. Additionally, we areexpanding and improving our primary healthcare services and working hard to track statistics on HIV prevalence, mother to child HIV transmission, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and the Tuberculosis cure rate.

The third area we’re working very hard on is sport. It may seem unusual to place sport in the same basket as education and health, in a developing context. But we believe it makes sense, not only now, but over the long term. I established a sports-management company called Royal Bafokeng Sports three years ago, with the goal of promoting sport at village, regional, and national levels. I wanted physical fitness, team spirit, community identity, and commercial opportunity to flow from this agency. At present, our villagesports program involves 11,000 Bafokeng girls and boys, ages 6 to 17, in soccer, rugby, karate, netball, and athletics. The numbers are increasing daily, and I can say with confidence that the values and physical benefits of organized sport are quietly reshaping our community in very positive ways.

One of our strategies in sport is to combine club sport with professional teams, in order to create a total value chain of sporting excellence. Our two professional franchises, one in soccer and the other in rugby, are therefore not only striving for success in their respective rankings, they are also consciously serving as conduits for development and role models for the thousands of kids who watch them, support them, and aspire to walk and run in their shoes one day.

One of our recent projects has been to create a comprehensive facility where all of this can happen. We are about to launch the Bafokeng Sports Campus which has about twelve pitches, a track, a pool and lots of other facilities, so that young athletes can train and compete at the same venue as professional teams, getting real exposure to what it takes to make it to the top.And yes, the Sports Campus is also England’s home base for a certain upcoming tournament being hosted in South Africa.

So, how does a small African community find itself at the very pinnacle of world sport? It would be naïve to think we could do it all on the strength of good planning and great ideas. Thanks to my forebears, the Bafokeng Nation holds the title deeds to lands located on the famous Bushveld Igneous Complex, a.k.a. the largest platinum deposits in the world. Over the course of many decades of political and legal challenges to our ownership of the land, Bafokeng leaders held onto theirbirthright, and made every effort to ensure that the exploitation of its assets would serve the best interests of the people and the environment, while providing an income stream that could be used to help lift the surrounding communities out of poverty.

So, as a community, we own an investment company called Royal Bafokeng Holdings, which we established in 2006. The CEO of RBH is here with us today and despite the challenging economic conditions of the past two years, we have managed to stay afloat and to continue supporting the kinds of programs in health and education that I mentioned earlier.

The bulk of our investment portfolio rests in mining stocks, and in particular Impala Platinum and Anglo Platinum. We are also invested in quite a number of other sectors, including telecommunications, financial services, and the energy sector. The aim is to diversify our investment portfolio sufficiently so that when the platinum dividends run out, as they inevitably will, we will have established our interests in other sectors to ensure that the community derives an income stream well into the future.

We hope that sport will continue to be an area that not only offers a social dividend to the Bafokeng community, but also one that begins to generate financial returns as we position ourselves to host international tournaments, professional training, and winter camps for teams in the northern hemisphere. This is one of the benefits of hosting six matches of the upcoming soccer World Cup in our stadium, the Royal Bafokeng Sports Palace. The other benefits include stimulating the local economy for a short period--four weeks if England makes it to the finals, and shorter than that if they don’t. We also intend to make the most of the spotlight cast on the Bafokeng Nation in the lead-up to the event to raise awareness of our plans and our vision. And perhaps most important of all, we look forward to the opportunity to expose our community to everything that comes with an event of this magnitude: the planning, the strategies, the investment, the visitors, and the sense that if we can do this, we can truly do anything. For us, that will be the single most important legacy of the 2010 World Cup: the idea that we possess the ability to set our own course into the future, if we choose to do so.

The World Cup is an extraordinary opportunity for us, but as I mentioned at the outset, we think of things on a longer horizon, and the issue is always: “what will this mean in 50 or 100 years?” And that takes me back to leadership. By way of answering those who seek to contrast the Royal Bafokeng Nation with more “modern” institutions, it is my view that people often get caught up in conventional ideological distinctions, and fail to see things as they are. The Royal Bafokeng is both traditional and modern. We see no contradiction there. Couldn’t we say the same thing about these Houses of Parliament? We are both a community with pressing local needs, and a major South African corporation seeking to balance its investments to weather global financial storms. We are as passionate about preserving the past as we are about strategizing for the future. We are proudly South African even as we cherish our Bafokeng heritage.

Our country’s constitution enshrines a form of democracy that involves political parties competing for votes, and politicians who are mandated to meet the needs of the people through policymaking and legislation. Our constitution also recognizes traditional leadership. In the seven hundred or so traditionally-governed communitiesin South Africa, forms of deliberation and decision-making that originate in Africa and in many cases predate the arrival of Europeans are still in use. In the Royal Bafokeng Nation, our traditional legislature is made up of seventy-two hereditary headmen, as well as five elected and five appointed Councilors, many of them women. We formulate policy and approve budgets in much the same way as other legislative bodies, and our ultimate mandate comes from the community itself, who meet twice a year in our general meeting, or Kgotha-kgothe, where all major decisions are ratified by a direct vote.

Our systems of leadership and governance are not stuck in the past, but change with the times like everything else. Although traditional leadership and electoral democracy are two different approaches to governance, South Africa has, in effect, embraced both. The chiefs and kings are strong in rural areas like Bafokeng, and this is because our communities retain a faith in communal values—neighbors should not only know each other, they should assist each other. Adults should be responsible. Children should be cherished and nurtured. We should respect the dignity and value of all people, as well as of our natural environment—our inheritance.

As a traditionally-governed community, the Royal Bafokeng Nation’s combination of leaders for life and leaders chosen through democratic processes supplies us with a critical mix of wisdom, experience, skills, and ideas. With a shared vision and common purpose, the men and women who lead the Bafokeng Nation do so with an acute sense of responsibility, not just for the present, but also for future generations of Bafokeng. I believe this is a commitment that my Great Grandfather King Khama would recognize and support, just as I recognize and support his innovative decision to reach out to England to strike a strategic partnership to help ensure the sustainability of his community. We could not be more proud or more excited about our upcoming partnership with Team England in the World Cup, and I am certain that my ancestors will smile on the team as they make the Royal Bafokeng Nation their home away from home. However, it goes without saying, and as with all things meritocratic, may the best team prevail!

Thank you, and I’m happy to answer your questions.

END.