A ‘GOOD’ LEADER: LEADERSHIP OF A SPECIAL TYPE IN NUM

There is no leadership where there is no power relation. But leadership fails to exercise power effectively if it lacks another asset: authority. If one follows Hanna Arendt, authority is what gets lost in the transition to political modernity, a shift that is well exemplified by NUM's adoption of a Weberian type of collective organisation. This tension was clear, for instance, in August 2012, when NUM leaders kept telling their members on strike to go back to work with no result: they had organisational power (as described in Part I) but lacked the associated authority to exert it effectively. As Richard Sennett wrote, ‘The bond of authority is built of images of strength and weakness; it is the emotional expression of power.’ The word ‘bond’ has a double meaning, which expresses at the same time a ‘connection’ and a ‘constraint’, because authority is as much needed for one to prosper (as in the case of parental authority) as it is feared since it holds the prospect of enslavement. Leadership and authority are considered necessary to govern human societies and, over the past century, strong leaders were equally needed in communist and in liberal settings. What differed between the two, however, was the definition of how a ‘good leader’ is expected to behave. ‘Authoritarianism’ – a negative concept used to point at a deviation from authority – suggests that when exercised with discernment, authority and leadership are often viewed in a good light from an ethical point of view, as positive qualities in the exercise of power. Definitions of what a ‘good leader’ is or ought to be may vary from one person, group or society to another, yet they always obey a ‘moral economy’ of leadership that grounds the leader's legitimacy. As Max Weber observed, authority identifies with legitimacy: people do not obey those they deem illegitimate. The rejection by their own members that NUM leaders have experienced since 2012 is decisively rooted in such disaffection, and what is important is not whether NUM leaders are indeed corrupt or bureaucratised, but the fact that they are perceived as such by entire segments of their constituency. This said, however, neither corruption nor bureaucratisation is enough to make a leader illegitimate.