I WAS glued to the television when Julius Malema's farm was auctioned off on June 10.

Now, those who laugh at Malema's misfortune, especially if it was ill-gotten, might have missed the big political message from this moving picture.

Malema's land was bought by a group of white farmers and they restored to themselves a puniest bit that has been put in black hands since 1994.

The sale took place just as the country commemorates the centenary of the Land Act of 1913, which comes on the heels of the ANC's centenary celebrations.

Next year, we will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of democracy and there will be several jamborees to mark this occasion. We are very good at this sort of thing; commemorations of this or that massacre of "our people".

As the farmers retook Malema's land, I was reminded of a quote by US President Barack Obama about how "power" reclaimed power in Chicago after the death of the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington. "Power was patient and power could out-wait slogans and prayers and candlelight vigils," Obama said.

In South Africa power has out-waited not only Malema, but all of the ruling party's sloganeering - from Growth, Employment and Redistribution to Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa to the New Growth Plan to all the slogans not yet born.

And nobody competes in the acronyms stakes.

But power is frightening in SA because of the failure of black leadership over the past 20 years.

To better explain this one has to go into a brief explication of the historical role of black leaders in South Africa over the past two centuries, for example, as a means of surviving and even outsmarting European domination.

Despite all the heroic talk about leaders as revolutionaries, mostly leaders act as intermediaries between power and the people.

Early African leaders such as John Jabavu and John Dube saw their role as keeping the lid on the hot temperament in the black world. Later, a more radical group of leaders - Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko - knew how to leverage the hot temperament to get concessions from power.

They were quite reasonable chaps, compared to the hotheads in their midst. For example, after a long negotiation process with a rector of a university, Biko would put up his hands in exasperation and say: "Okay then, I guess you will have to deal with Stanley [Ntwasa] or Harry [Nengwekhulu] then." At which point the rector would say, "Okay, okay Mr Biko, we will agree to your request."

It was a good cop, bad cop dance that Zuma and Malema could not quite pull off. I suspect in Zuma and Malema the main ingredients were absent; reasonableness and trust, both between the two men and in their relationship with the people.

A perception soon built up that the new leadership catered only to its own interests, while the people who had elected them starved.

But this is a story that extends beyond Zuma and Malema to this country's political leadership over the past 20 years. In fact, it's a story that extends to the African continent since independence.

In his latest book, Of Africa, Wole Soyinka describes the gluttony as "a crisis of leadership alienation" with the emergence of "individuals or classes from within the suppressed who now proceed to inaugurate a new era and axis of differentiation with the same mentality of domination and/or exploitation".

Soyinka writes that they carry on "the agenda of the original intruders", by stealing everything that moves. The question really is whether we are aware that we live in "a new era and axis of differentiation".

It seems to me that until we frame the problems of this country in that epochal language, we shall never understand the gravity of what awaits us as a society, and the kind of leadership we will need to resolve them.

The buying back of Malema's farm is a metaphor for strategic leadership by those who spend their time thinking about the things that really matter, while the politicians spend their time entertaining the people with slogans and telling them fictional tales about the revolution.

In this new era, Soyinka writes, the politicians "actualise power, then fictionalise the people".