The Leaders We Never Built

Twelve years ago I sat down with Helen Zille for a second time. She had been leader of the Democratic Alliance for seven years, and among the things I asked her about was succession.

Her answer was thoughtful, and it has stayed with me. She told me that understanding how to do succession planning had become important to her in a way it had not been five years earlier. She said the moment someone came along who could do the job better than her — grow the party, hold it together — she would be the first to step down. And she described her succession plan in concrete terms: consciously building platforms for the many voices and faces in the party, and enabling them to drive their own issues and profiles.

She then named them. Lindiwe Mazibuko. Mmusi Maimane. Patricia de Lille. Wilmot James. Makashule Gana. Solly Msimanga. She was, in that moment, doing exactly what we tell leaders to do.

It is now 2026. Helen Zille, at seventy-four, is the DA's candidate for mayor of Johannesburg.

I want to be careful here. This is not an argument about age, and it is certainly not an accusation against her. She did not cling to power — she handed the leadership to Mmusi Maimane in 2015. She is answering a call. My question is a different and more uncomfortable one: why is the call being made to her at all?

The pattern, stated plainly

Look at what is happening in South Africa right now.

In Johannesburg's mayoral race, the DA's candidate is Helen Zille, seventy-four, a former mayor of Cape Town, former Premier of the Western Cape and former leader of her party. Contesting against her is Herman Mashaba, sixty-six, leader of ActionSA — who was himself mayor of Johannesburg from 2016 to 2019, and is now seeking to reclaim the office he left.

In April, President Ramaphosa appointed Roelf Meyer as South Africa's Ambassador to the United States — at seventy-eight, more than thirty years after he sat across the negotiating table from Ramaphosa himself during the transition.

And in business, Pick n Pay recalled Sean Summers to the chief executive's office in 2023 at the age of seventy, more than a decade after he had left it, to rescue a retailer in serious trouble.

Four consequential roles in South African public and commercial life — and in each case, the answer was a name we already knew.

I have interviewed most of these people. I have deep respect for every one of them. Each is answering a genuine call, at an age when they might reasonably have declined. That is admirable, and I want to say so clearly before I say anything else.

But we should ask the harder question. Where is everybody else?

The fair counter-argument, which deserves a hearing

Let me put the strongest case against my own point, because it is a real one.

Experience is not a defect. Wisdom genuinely accumulates. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with a capable person of seventy-four serving their city, and a great deal wrong with the assumption that leadership belongs only to the young. These are people with hard-won judgement, established credibility, and — crucially — track records that voters and boards can actually verify. In a crisis, you send for someone who has done it before. That is not a failure of planning. That is prudence.

Moreover, some of these situations are genuinely exceptional. A diplomatic relationship in serious difficulty may call for a negotiator of unusual standing. A retailer close to the edge may need someone who knows the business in his bones.

I accept all of that. And yet.

One detail that gives the game away

Here is what I cannot argue away, and it comes from the business example rather than the political ones.

When Pick n Pay recalled Sean Summers, the board did not merely ask him to fix the company. According to the group's own remuneration disclosures, the development and implementation of a chief executive succession plan was written in as a vesting condition of his share award. In other words, the board had to attach a financial incentive to the production of a successor. And that particular milestone has since been pushed back by a year, in line with his own extended retirement date.

Read that again. A major South African company found it necessary to pay its returning chief executive to produce the person who would replace him — and then had to move the deadline. If succession were being done properly anywhere, it would not need to be purchased.

That is not an indictment of Summers, who by all accounts is doing exactly what he was asked to do, and who forfeited a substantial share award when the turnaround slipped. It is an indictment of the system that made his return necessary in the first place — and that could not, without a contractual clause, generate the next one.

So what does the pattern actually tell us?

I have spent twenty-five years interviewing leaders and studying how they are made. My honest reading is this.

We have focused on identifying talent and we are appalling at developing it. We spot the promising young executive, the impressive young politician, the capable young principal — and then we hand them responsibility and hope. We send them on a course. We give them a mentor if they are lucky and the mentor has time. We promote them when a gap appears. And then we are surprised, a decade later, that we have no one ready.

Succession planning in most South African organisations means a spreadsheet with names in boxes. It seldom means a deliberate, sustained programme of developing the human maturity that senior leadership actually requires. We plan for the seat. We do not develop the person.

And Helen Zille's answer to me twelve years ago illustrates the difficulty exactly. She was doing the right thing — consciously building platforms, elevating people, creating visibility. But platforms are opportunity, not development. Several of the people she named have since left the party altogether. Opportunity without deep development produces exposure, not readiness — and when the pressure comes, the gap between the two becomes visible very quickly.

Or is it simply that wisdom takes time?

There is a more generous explanation, and I think it is partly true. Perhaps we are not failing at all. Perhaps maturity and wisdom simply take decades, and there is no shortcut. Perhaps a person genuinely needs to have been wrong publicly, to have lost something that mattered, to have carried real responsibility through real failure, before they can be trusted with a city or a company in crisis.

I believe there is something to that. Almost every leader I have interviewed points to their failures, not their successes, as the source of whatever wisdom they possess. Helen Zille told me plainly that she learns far more from her mistakes than from what goes well. That is nearly universal among people who have led anything difficult.

But if wisdom has always taken decades to accumulate, then we have a serious problem — because we are entering a period in which we no longer have decades.

Why this becomes grave now

Everything above would be a manageable concern in a slow-moving world. It is not a manageable concern in the one now arriving.

Artificial intelligence is advancing exponentially. Serious people building it speak openly of systems that may match or surpass human capability within a few years. Whatever one makes of the precise timelines, the direction is not seriously disputed, and the implications for every institution in this country — every company, every department, every school — are enormous.

Which means we are about to ask a generation of leaders to make decisions of extraordinary consequence, at speed, with no precedent to draw on, about a technology most of them do not understand — and we are doing it with a leadership bench so thin that we are calling septuagenarians out of retirement to run our cities and rescue our companies.

Consider what those decisions will actually require. Whether to use AI to replace your people or to develop them. Whether to trust a confident machine's answer over an uncomfortable human one. What to automate and what to protect. How to hold a workforce together through a transition none of them chose. These are not technical questions. Every one of them is a question of character, judgement and moral courage.

The AI era will not be decided by the leaders who understand the technology best. It will be decided by the leaders who are most developed as human beings.

What we should actually be building

If that is true, then the question becomes concrete: developed in what, exactly?

After twenty-five years of asking leaders what made the difference, I would name eight capabilities. They are not skills in the usual sense. They are the substance of a mature human being, and they are precisely what artificial intelligence cannot supply.

Agency — the capacity to think and decide for yourself, and never to outsource your judgement to a machine or a crowd. Accountability — owning the outcome, including the bad one. Moral judgement — knowing not merely what can be done but what should be. Commitment — staying with something difficult long after the enthusiasm has gone. Relationship — the ability to build and hold genuine trust, which every leader I have interviewed names as decisive. Faith — unshakeable belief in your people, in the possibility of the future and in something or someone greater than yourself. Hope — the ability to see and hold a future worth working toward. And heart — purpose and passion; a leader who actually loves the people they serve.

Look down that list and ask honestly: which of them does a typical leadership development programme deliberately build? We teach strategy, finance, digital transformation and communication. We assume the rest arrives with age, if it arrives at all.

And that assumption — that maturity is a by-product of time rather than something we deliberately develop — is precisely why we are calling seventy-eight-year-olds back into service.

The only real answer

So we are left with a genuine dilemma. Wisdom has historically taken decades. We no longer have decades. Both statements are true.

The only resolution I can see is this: we must stop leaving maturity to accumulate accidentally, and start developing it deliberately and consciously — far earlier than we ever have before.

Not a workshop at forty-five. Not an executive programme at fifty. Deliberate development of judgement, accountability, moral courage and character, beginning in school and continuing every day of a working life. If wisdom traditionally arrives through decades of experience, then the task is to make it conscious — to name these capabilities, teach them explicitly, and develop them daily, in a fourteen-year-old and a thirty-year-old manager and a fifty-year-old executive alike.

That is what my own work is now devoted to, and I will not pretend otherwise: building personal development partners that develop these eight human capabilities every day, at scale, from Grade 8 through maths and science to school leaders, public servants, entrepreneurs and executives. Whether that particular answer proves to be the right one is for others to judge. But the underlying diagnosis seems to me difficult to escape.

Because here is where the pattern ends if we do nothing. In ten years' time, when the AI transition is fully upon us and the institutions of this country are under strain we can barely imagine, someone will look around a boardroom or a caucus for a person ready to lead — and will find themselves reaching, once again, for a familiar name from a previous era.

Except by then, those names will no longer be available.

We can keep calling back the leaders we have. Or we can start building the ones we will need. There is not much time to decide.

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Adriaan Groenewald has interviewed hundreds of South African and international leaders over twenty-five years, including several of those named in this article. He is the founder of Human Advancement Infrastructure, building personal AI development partners for leaders and learners.

adriaan@mevisionacademy.com · ThinkLead.app