We are in March 2022. The world watches in surprise as the world stage plays a drama with codes which we thought were those of another era. Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, the Moghuls, Western Empirical powers all deemed in their time, following the ideology of their day, that they were fully on the side of legitimacy and morality, if not jingoism, when they invaded other nations, seized territories, plundered, killed, rape and erased people and cultures. Since then the world has changed and International treaties have been put in place: The 1907 Hague Convention , The Geneva Convention of 1949. Despite skirmishes which often deliberately went under the radar of the international mainstream media, it has become understood that the invasion of one country by another for annexing its territory are the legacies of a bygone age, despite the fact that military invasions have occurred again and again, often presented as peace efforts, when it came with the sanctimonious of Western ‘peacemaking’ through war.
However, the recent move into full-fledged invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin has shocked the world. But despite the self-righteous outrage across the world and absolute sympathy with the Ukranian population being slaughtered at the altar of international geo-politics, one cannot help but feel there must be more than meets the eye in this war which seems to have dropped from a time warp capsule.
For one thing, there is a lot which could be said about the hypocrisy of maintaining world peace through the deterrence of arms, which has fueled international arms trade for many decades now. When engineers imagine and strategists project, game developers invent fantasies of invasion, a scenario like today’s must secretly feel like a dream come true for those devising strategies and games in their comfortable offices while the people on the ground are left to cope with the impact of all this slaughter.
It is significant that the Ukrainian president has donned his military uniform to fight, responding with the same antiquated code which Putin has publicly used to mask the geo-political reality of this conflict. The amenable vast territory of Ukraine has proved central to its destiny. It has known multiple invasions by almost every military front from Napoleon to the Ottomans. But today it matters as being centrally positioned as a major gas pipeline supplier for Western Europe. Throw into this its rich natural mineral resources such as coal and metallic minerals. Despite almost universal transformation of Vladimir Putin into a caricatural villain, we have to bear in mind the potential sense of vulnerability which Russia apprehends should Ukraine be in league with powers so ready to undermine Russia's long standing regional influence over this area of the world. Caught in a international geopolitical game which plays upon the legitimate desire for independence of a nation, Ukrainian find themselves caught today in a conflict which seems to come from pre-twentieth century scenario. The point of invoking the Ukrainian scenario is to provide a contrast to the type of leadership which the world has witnessed over the last few years, during the abominable pandemic years.
In the last few years the populations of the world have watched in dismay as one ineffective leader, succeeds another almost everywhere. There seems to be very few of our international political leaders who can live up to the old image we have of decisive well-informed charismatic leadership which made the hey-day of the middle years of the first half of the twentieth century the world over.
It is curious how suddenly all nations seem to have been confronted with a spate of incompetent, ego-centric or deliberately obtuse leaders. Don’t we all dream of a world where the Premiers will, rather than go for a grab at power for power’s sake, really pull up their sleeves and start tackling the real problems of poverty and unemployment and finally get to the much needed reforms in the health and education sector, before they deal with the urgent social disturbances created with the swiftly changing conditions of urban and rural existence, due to the impact of the simultaneous globalization and fragmentation of our flows of information and its concurrent parallel and contradictory lines of identification and collective self-projection. Not to speak of the urgent issue of climate change and its impact on habitat and food. At this point in time the populations of the world feel that they are at the end of a much lengthened rope of endurance and that the time has now come for fairer treatment of the populace by its political leaders.
There is a cynical popular saying which states that one gets only the leaders one deserves. But that is not taking into account the way in which the last three decades and the technological somersault we have experienced have dramatically altered our localized and collective experience while the narratives describing those experiences have remained stuck in a nostalgic idea of an old order of the world.
This is not to say that chaos should be left free reign. But the conjunction of the contradictory pulls of globalization in the world of education and culture have been confronted with the lateral axis of indigenous or community allegiances whose narratives of identification often remain at the level of the spoken word only, therefore difficult to document, as they are passed down through oral tradition across the generations, sometimes not even through words but through an approach to space, time and nature which modulate the pattern of days and imprint on the growing consciousness of children an implicit understanding of a vision of the world, which they would be hard put to describe objectively while they practice it.
In this way, we find that there are always rhizomic escapees from the official pro-globalisation positions, which complicate decision making at all levels of institutional and state organisations. An archaeology of how power works or does not work in postcolonial societies would be a much needed research. Some famous African writers have expressed their disillusion with the post-independence failures of their nations. Some of these are Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born- 1968), Chinua Achebe (Anthills of the Savannahs-1987)
At this point in these reflections it might help to offer a solution to the problem of leadership, but as observers we are all caught in the paradoxes of the pragmatics of space and time. However, if the beginning of a solution can come from understanding the past, maybe this is where we should go to understand ideas of leadership.
In Constructing the Political Spectacle( 1988) Murray Eldelman talks about the construction and use of political leaders and he makes a few interesting observations: according to him, more often than not, appointed political leaders are but the front to mask a very confused, often corrupt political ecology. They get elected by becoming a symbol of change, innovation and transformation but paradoxically their political image and survival depends upon treading the middle ground of consensus, pactising with rival partners and ensuring the continuation of conservative, recognizable modes of social organization which will lull voters in the quietude and comfort of habit, rather than force them to change. Despite that murky political ecology around the figurehead of the leaders are crystallized notions of competence, nationalism and its obverse. Ultimately belief in leadership is a catalyst of conformity and obedience.
The paradoxes of political dialogue have a lot to do with it, as in their quest for political survival, specially in the present day of instant transmission of action, words, behavior, political figures tend to invent commitments dependent upon the fashion of the day, rather than ideologically understand the long term implications of the causes they apparently sponsor. This could explain the pervasive disappointment and failed expectations for action. In short political aspirants have less of an image to respect and can better propose real innovation than established figures who need to surf upon the interest of the day and be ready to publicly change their allegiance and commitment as the expediency of the moment warrants. This goes a lot towards explaining the wait-and-see attitude of most prominent political figures. Causes in themselves matter less than the fashion of the day, hence the voters are forever left with an illusion of hope followed by dissatisfaction by the inexistence of political action to follow upon stated intention,
According to Elderman: ‘Leaders win acclaim and their followers win reassurance and hope from courses of action that reaffirm accepted ideologies while connoting boldness, intelligence, change, and paternal protection.’ (1988)
There are many ways to build the public image of a leader, one of these obviously goes through mastering political rhetoric, committing to socially visible causes which draw sympathy like the socialization of children, rather than more thankless involvement in more long term improvement which can lead to genuine social transformation over time. Because the position of the political leader depends upon the continuation of the existing social structure rather than its overturn, and by so doing the established leader implicitly endorses the dominant social ideology rather than challenge it.
On the one hand there is a tradition which thinks that leaders emerge from the social condition and commitment which create them, as they become ‘spaces’ through which the concerns of the day are articulated. They are inevitably the product of group interests, created through the interplay of social, linguistic and political group preoccupations.
On the other hand, some conservative thinkers tend to think leadership is an innate quality. This was mostly associated with nineteenth century conservative ideas that leadership as an innate quality which is inherited. Despite the inequalities of the distribution of wealth, power, prestige and clout, the twentieth century’s major models of education have systematically worked to prove the second option as fallacious and untenable. Unfortunately, in many postcolonial countries there systematically seems to exist an overlap between modern notions of political leadership and old notions of tribal and community leadership. Hence we have the uneasy situation of dynastic politics which throttle the very notion of democracy by installing a grip of hegemonic control which can sometimes outrun the existence of a party in power.
How does the media deal with the myth of leadership. It seems that in general the people who make up the media are as saturated as the population in general with popular myths of cyclically reinvented politicians as they run after existing and potential leaders, be they weak willed and ineffective or braggart and ineffective, locked in the wait-and-see game on every side. The media deals with them through everyday reporting which reinforce the image, the myth at the expense of the real exercise of power. It is easier to talk about statistics, rallies, legislations, important appointments than to investigate the real consequence of the loopholes of power on the lives of real citizens. Whose interest is being served by the maintenance of the status quo as the will to analyse and understand recedes? That the citizens are generally dissatisfied with their politicians is understandable but that the media should have reached the level of also inducing disinterest in the people whose very voice they aim to represent and articulate is cause for concern. Maybe it is time to revive the high ideals of the Fourth estate as a counterpoint to political power and reinvent another form of leadership in the realm of ideas rather than power.
In any case is it not all a stage. As we watch Putin and Zelenskyy stalk their stage let us take time to reflect on staging our own performance in leadership of ideas.