Bongani Mwelase - from hero to zero

Jacob Zuma, South African president for the past seven months or so, has been named African president of the year.

Either Zuma must be brilliant in his job (in spite of allegedly interfering in the Eskom board fiasco this weekend), or all his continental colleagues are useless. This supposedly “prestigious” prize is inappropriately sponsored by the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation – Kaunda was no glowing example of how to be an African president.

One of the things I’m objecting to is this modern trend of instant gratification – like giving Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his presidency! Couldn’t they have found another Mother Theresa somewhere on this planet?

The other thing I object to is this need to praise leaders! My view is that they are (hopefully) elected officials who should be doing their jobs. And quite frankly, the less often they’re in the limelight, the better they’re probably doing their jobs.

The obvious example would be Athletics SA (ASA) president Leonard Chuene – who has been likened to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe – who keeps appearing in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Do elected leaders need or deserve awards? It reminds me of a story I once heard about a politician who went to the Business Times Top 100 Awards dinner as the guest speaker several years ago. This politician, who may or may not be SA’s head of state, mentioned to a couple of people how he liked this idea of awards, and suggested there should be awards for politicians.

One of those people replied: “But there are already awards for politicians – they’re called the elections.”

The problem with instant gratification I mentioned earlier is that we tend to over-rate and evaluate people before they have finished their work.

For example, in boxing you have Sugar Ray Robinson who is widely regarded the best fighter pound-for-pound of all time.

But today you have fans arguing that the honour belongs to Floyd Mayweather. Mayweather is unbeaten in 40 professinal fights. Robinson had 40 fights before he suffered his first defeat, but he eventually retired with 173 wins, 19 losses and six draws, not to mention winning the world middleweight title five times.

Robinson fought everyone – Mayweather has ducked certain opponents.

Here in South Africa we have Bongani Mwelase, a classy amateur who won a 2006 Commonwealth Games gold before turning professional and winning the national title a couple of years later. For that victory he was given a special award at Boxing SA’s annual prize-giving – and what has he done since then? He’s got lazy and fat!

If there’s one area where you can’t force instant gratification, it’s gardening. Sure, you can plant something with pretty flowers today, but there’s no guarantee it will survive tomorrow. But when those plants do survive – and thrive – growing bigger and more beautiful, you feel a special sense of joy and achievement.

It’s all about patience. And there’s too little of that in the world today.

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