Ganesh P Paudel
Leaders and their leadership skills in their own realm is worth remembering because of the legacy they leave behind not because of the fact that they once existed and presided over a certain period of time. If the legacy is enduring one over and above being altruistic then the leaders are worth cherishing and their principles should continue to become the ideals for every leader in successive generations.
The essence of the ideals of the great leaders should remain intact by allowing other things to be subject to change as per the need of the era the society is in. For example, at the heart of the principle of our great leader BP Koirala there lied democracy, but other things he then envisioned for the people of Nepali society are subject to change. He so aptly said that our goal should be to provide each farmer with a tract of land to till, and a milch-breed cow. Needless to say, it now sounds too modest a goal for an agrarian economy. However, his overall ideals of democracy, equality and social justice that he stood for will forever be as relevant.
A blatantly bad leader is better than a blithely mediocre one-and thereby hangs a tale. The former can be overthrown whereas the latter leads the team to stagnation or status quo. A bad leader keeps undergoing the scathing public opinions, which sooner or later will be ousted or consigned to oblivion. But a mediocre one keeps his people under the false hope of better tomorrow thereby prolonging his tenure. Mediocre leader is something akin to an untreated diseased condition of a part of a body. It is undermining the health of the whole body with each passing day.
On that note, two people come to my mind as the fitting examples of a charismatic leader and a mediocre one from one of the schools I worked in the past. I’d like to call one a charismatic leader although he didn’t apparently have a gift of jab- something people think is the defining attribute of a good leader. In fact, rhetoric strikes multiple chords with the mass, which might be a passing infatuation, but what is enduring about a leader is his track record of walking the talk. Oratory skill turns out to be just an icing on the cake if a leader possesses traits of unimpeachable rectitude and integrity along with equanimity, magnanimity, fearlessness and a marked assertiveness in the set of beliefs that his team espouses. Who would like lip service after all!
Out of the two leaders I am talking about, one happens to be an indomitable leader of the teachers’ union and the other is a run-of-the-mill kind of principal from the same school. They both presided over almost the same time period. The former finished his three consecutive tenures for the union’s president with flying colors whereas the latter ended his two consecutive tenures as damp squib. The successful leader, who I still am in communication with, recounts how he, during his stint as union’s president, always used to have a burning desire of introducing something landmark for the collective welfare of the institution and the people working there. His reforms range from providing the letter of permanency of the job to providing twenty five percent monthly allowance of the basic monthly salary prescribed by the government among many others.
On the other hand, the other leader as the principal did nothing towards bringing reforms. Back then, I, along with many other colleagues, used to lament over the fact that the principal, despite being a Sanskrit scholar with a university degree of the same, had squandered the opportunity of being a trailblazer in establishing a cult of Sanskrit language among the “A” grade schools in the Kathmandu Valley. All he did was put his energy in safeguarding his post of principal by using every trick in the book. He was neither able to endear himself among his subordinates nor was able to be a tower of strength for the institution from the school management’s perspective.
Behind the back to back success of a leader, there lies the courage to translate the vision into reality and a mind to identify the problem that has inherently been there for the team that the leader represents. But in our society, there are many cases where business owners and government authorities are blatantly flouting rules and going about their shoddy and scrupulous activities and the affected people are just living each day grimacing and cursing their own destiny. The ultimate goal of a leader should be to produce more leaders, not followers. In a demagogic leadership one produces sheep-like followers, not thinkers. The voices of dissent in a democratic process is as essential as unanimity of opinion. Such voices keep democracy vibrant and functional so long as there is a system in place to address them. Everybody is hankering after publicity and making a fast buck out of the things they are doing. In this cut-throat scenario, common people which obviously constitute the 99.99 percent of the total world population are the most disadvantaged. Why is the insignificant cluster of people in control of the destiny of the rest? It is because from the grassroots level we do not have a resounding leadership mechanism while all bad things happen at the grassroots before it plagues the whole nation and humanity at large.
The world’s current social maladies such as pollution, corruptions, unethical business practices, exploitation of workers at private sectors, withering morality of the powers that be, etc., are because of the people under the guise of the mediocre leaders rather than the brazenly bad ones. So, nipping the mediocrity in leadership in its bud stage through the conscious uprising of common people, where everyone uses their discretionary power, is the need of the hour.
(Author is a freelancer and educator. He can can be accessed through gpbabaje@gmail.co
