Of Useless Leaders

I will continue irritating some of you by writing about politics and political leadership.

Let me start by asking a simple question.

What do you use to gauge a successful parent?

A successful parent is simply one who has raised all his children to independence.

Success of the children is not enough for the parent if his very educated and jet set offspring are always coming to him to beg for sustenance. It is frustrating if his very successful children are refusing to leave home because the world for them is a hard place. It is not success if all his sons and daughters are bringing him children to raise. It is not success if he must be consulted before the smallest decision is made. And it is not success if the successful children use their success on immorality and substance abuse.

The mark of a successful parent is foresight.

He will get a child who can do nothing for himself and over time transform him into someone who is raising many others to great heights.

A leader is (or should be) exactly the same.

It is very sad that many of the people who love being called leaders are lords of poverty, to borrow from one of them.

They thrive in fighting to maintain poverty levels so that they can buy support and votes very cheaply.

An empowered populace is a very dangerous thing for them as they will have nobody to ‘fight’ for.

Let me mention security.

A functional country is not one where police patrol to deter or fight criminals because then we will need a policeman for every five or so people.

A functional state is one where someone can leave their gate open overnight without worrying whether anything will be stolen from their compound. And that will happen when everybody is empowered and can comfortably live.

In our country, only the armed forces are allowed to carry weapons. It is therefore illegal for me to arm myself to protect what is mine.

The state will not make me safe by placing a policeman at my gate at night. They will do so by ensuring that none of my neighbors sleeps hungry or is unable to raise his children.

Disparity is a normal thing. Remember God saying that the poor will always be with the Israelites, unless they choose to follow His commandments and instructions?

But disparity has its limits.

When some rich are stinking rich (meaning they smell bad for their riches), and the poor are hopelessly poor, then we have a huge problem in our hands. The balance has been tipped badly.

In my childhood we were poor and there were some who were better.

A neighbor drove a lorry (Americans call them trucks) for a wholesaler in town and once in a while would have it stay overnight at his place.

The next morning the children from the whole village would be gathered at his gate.

Do you know why? He would carry all of them to school.

That vehicle ‘belonged’ to him. But it was the responsibility of the whole village to protect it because it served them.

Let me give you another story, again of people I know.

This family was very rich (according to those times) as both the husband and wife had cars at a time very few people had shoes.

But they were also proud.

They therefore did not offer anybody a lift in their vehicles as they would dirty them. They were reserved for the family, for many years.

Then one day the man of the house had an accident and the vehicle lay on him, for lack of better words, not far from his home.

Do you know what the neighbors did and said?

We are sorry we do not want to dirty your car. Let us run to call the ones who will not dirty it.

They then ran to the mzee’s home to call the ones who were there.

Of course the weight on him could not wait for the deserving people to arrive and that is how he died.

You might think the neighbors were wicked.

But think of this person who had to trek for hours with a sick child to the nearest place they can get some transport. Think of the person who was rushing to an emergency and the vehicle blew dust on him and refused to even acknowledge his raised hands. Think of the mother who delivered on the roadside as the same vehicle passed them struggling. Think of the person whose loved one died because the way to hospital was too long.

Unlike our situation, those vehicles did not belong to the community. And that because their owners did not belong to the community. As such none owed the other anything.

It is such situations leaders should be seeking to rectify by making sure that the disparities are not so extreme and that the community is not so fragmented.

A leader who invests in his and his cronies’ betterment is worse than useless. He is dangerous to society, and of course to himself.

This is because he will be increasing the disparity to dangerous levels. The gap between citizens and the ruler and his cronies will reach unmanageable levels because they are the ones eating all the taxes whereas the ones paying those taxes get nothing in return.

It will eventually reach a point where the populace will become desperate. Then even if the army protects them and their wealth, it would not make much of a difference as they will essentially have nothing to lose.

The last time I posted on leadership I mentioned the fact that compared to our neighbors, animal feeds are too expensive as to make animal farming feasible. Farm inputs are too expensive as to make crop husbandry also unfeasible.

The fact that we must import so much food from neighboring countries, countries whose weather is not different from ours; the sad fact being that their food is many times cheaper that what we produce even after transportation.

For this I will give an A for uselessness in leadership.

Another thing I will say that makes me call our leadership useless is the fact that though we produce our own power, people and companies are shifting to solar and investing billions to do so.

All because we have a utility power company that eats and eats and eats without caring what those they are eating from are getting in return.

That a company without competition can operate at a loss is a clear indictment of the government and its leaders. It goes without say that they are the ones eating the utility company.

In a short while we will be asked to bail out the company again because they have too much power without consumers because they chased them away.

In the past we used to buy crude oil and refine it. Now we have oil and the leaders are telling us that it is not feasible to refine it ourselves.

We must therefore sell it crude and buy it refined.

If that is not folly, we must look for another dictionary.

Why should I sell my unshelled maize to my neighbor to later buy it after he shells it?

These are some of the things I am challenging people to look at when considering who to vote for.

A leader worth his salt is one whose leadership reduces his influence by empowering his populace and not the other way round.

Just look at David.

He started with useless rejects but later was comfortable having them making decisions for him, with some even rebuking him and he did not retaliate because he had accomplished his leadership mandate.

David made his people richer and was the better for it. Solomon made Israel richer and lost the kingdom due to that as his people were the ones who paid the price for the same.

You never go down by lifting others, especially those way down the ladder.

Infrastructure without corresponding people empowerment is for me the epitome of greed as the leaders want to have the best for themselves, even roads that only they can use as nobody else can afford to use.

I am Christ’s minister and not a politician and must say things as I feel heaven needs them said.