I have finally settled the GOAT debate. It wasn’t Lionel Messi. It wasn’t Cristiano Ronaldo. It was a calendar. Turns out calendars are undefeated.
They don’t care how many Ballon d’Ors you’ve won or goals you’ve scored. One day the calendar simply flips to the next page and says, ‘Thank you for your service’. That is exactly what happened at the FIFA World Cup. The GOATs didn’t suddenly forget how to play football. They simply discovered what every legend eventually learns; the future doesn’t ask for permission. It arrives.
Football has never had a problem with succession. It doesn’t organise a national dialogue when a teenager replaces a legend. Nobody forms a commission to investigate why a 19-year-old starts ahead of a 39-year-old. The baton simply moves.
Football understands something politics often forgets; if you don’t prepare the future, the future will eventually prepare your obituary. Which brings us to Eswatini, where football’s natural law of succession meets political paralysis. Grassroots politics has invented the world’s longest apprenticeship. We recruit young people the way construction sites recruit wheelbarrows. Useful, heavy and completely mindless.
“Come, my boy, carry these chairs. Put up this tent. Wear this T-shirt, it’s two sizes too small, but wear it with pride.” They work for six hours in the sun. They’re sweating, clapping and laughing at jokes that stopped being funny around the time Nokia dominated the cellphone market. Then the big man in the tailored suit steps up to the microphone, clears his throat and whispers: “Alright, the adults are about to speak now. Go buy us some drinks.” That’s not leadership training. That’s unpaid event management. “We need experienced people,” they say. Experience, that magical qualification nobody can explain how you’re supposed to get without first being given an opportunity. It’s like advertising for a pilot but refusing to hire anyone who hasn’t already flown your aeroplane. Grassroots politics should be a nursery for leadership. Instead, it resembles a museum. Everything is old, protected and touching anything is strongly discouraged. No wonder the youth have stopped knocking on the door. The door has become a decorative feature.
We keep calling them leaders of tomorrow. Tomorrow! That poor fellow has been working overtime. Some people we still describe as the youth are now paying tax, raising children and comparing blood-pressure tablets. If tomorrow takes any longer, they’ll qualify for old-age grants before they qualify for leadership.
The tragedy is that football clubs understand succession better than political structures. Barcelona didn’t tell Lamine Yamal to wait until Messi turned 50. Real Madrid didn’t ask Kylian Mbappé to come back after 20years of observing meetings. The future was trusted with responsibility. Institutions that fear young people are usually institutions that fear the future.
Then there are those occupying leadership positions who become prisoners of their greatest hits. Every speech begins with: “When I built… When I introduced… When I rescued…” Wonderful, but the country woke up today, not in 1998. Leadership is like driving. The windscreen is bigger than the rear-view mirror for a reason. If you’re constantly looking backwards, don’t be surprised when you drive into a ditch. Public office was never intended to become a personality cult. The office, title, vehicle, furniture and air-conditioner belong to the people. You’re simply borrowing them until somebody else receives the keys. That’s public service, not public ownership.
Somewhere, however, customer service quietly packed its bags and emigrated. We’ve become so addicted to the word sabotage that accountability sounds like treason. “Where’s the hospital medicine?” Sabotage. “Where’s the money?” Foreign sabotage. “Why did the transformer blow up?” Clearly, the electricity went to an opposition rally.
At this rate, if a man slips on a banana peel in Mbabane tomorrow, some smarty pants won’t blame gravity. They’ll call a press conference to announce that the banana was radicalised by unemployed graduates. Honestly, if Noah’s Ark landed today, somebody would accuse the giraffes of foreign-funded sabotage.
Look at the math. Young people aren’t stupid; they can do basic arithmetic. They read the headlines: “Tighten your belts. Times are hard.” Then they look at a pay slip. One leader draws a salary as an official, a pension as a former director, an allowance for sitting on a committee and a stipend for breathing the air in the chamber.
And the graduate standing on the corner, holding a degree in accounting, looks at that and goes: “Wait a minute… how come one man gets four paycheques for one seat, but I can’t get one paycheque for four years of university?”
Now, don’t get me wrong. Everything they’re doing is legal; but legality and morality aren’t twins. Sometimes they aren’t even on speaking terms. Young people aren’t questioning whether payments comply with approved frameworks. They’re asking: “Why have a circular for politicians’ remuneration and still tie it to civil servants’ increments? Is this serving the people struggling to buy bread or the people explaining why bread is expensive from the comfort of multiple income streams?”
That gap doesn’t merely separate incomes. It separates realities. Leadership should never become so comfortable that it forgets what discomfort feels like. Last week, Justice Minister Prince Simelane probably delivered Parliament’s most honest punchline. Reflecting on corruption, he admitted: “Sesehlulekile” (“We have failed.”) Then, in classic Prince Simelane fashion, he joked that corruption would only end when Jesus Christ returned.
Parliament laughed. I laughed too. Then I remembered something. Jesus came the first time. Judas was already in the meeting.
