Bharrat Jagdeo lacks leadership qualities - Freddie Kissoon
Power has moral dimensions: The Channel 6 fiasco
In a letter to the Stabroek News two Sundays ago, I made the point that Mr. Jagdeo does not know anything about politics. Space didn’t permit me to elaborate. When one speaks about politics, one is not referring to the broad spectrum of politics. Everything is political, and politics encapsulates everything.
For example, foreign policy, trade matters, locations of new schools, appointments of state officials, which types of loans to take, and which ones should be rejected are all determined by political factors which are hardly complex and intricate. Politics is about running a country. In that sense Mr. Jagdeo is a practitioner of politics.
There are, however, complex, esoteric, elusive, nuanced dimensions of politics that every leader of a government must understand. The leader’s length of service and his/her popularity depend on the instinctive understanding of the nature of these dimensions. There are practical politics, theoretical politics, realpolitik, pragmatic politics (which though similar to practical politics has less morality in it), diplomatic politics (not meant in the foreign affairs sense).
In governing a country, the broad parameters of politics are not the only level the leader has to master. He/she has to be like a fox, smelling where the thorns are and knowing when to retreat. It was the great communist Lenin who once wrote that, in the acquisition of power, one must take one step backward in order to take two steps forward.
Comprehending the finer, delicate points of politics is what separates the novice leader, who will go out and never leave a positive legacy, from the astute theoretician who plays imaginary chess all the time while administering a country. Success in the exercise of power (by success I mean the longevity of it and its popular base) rests on the possession of leadership qualities. The Ohio University once had a project to measure leadership success and it came up with about nine such qualities. They are: – nationalism; integrity of character; situational sensitivity; conceptual complexity; self-confidence; belief that one can change the course of history; canopy of affiliation; Hobbesian awareness; willingness to use power.
In another column I will define each of these leadership traits (I did so in a column in KN many moons ago). A leader may not possess all of these, but definitely one or two would not do. To my mind, Jagan had one and one only, and that made him a failure in politics.
Burnham had eight of the nine. The missing one is one of the most important of these nine traits. It is not wise to openly state that a leader has none of these nine characteristics because you can end up in court. Included in the nine is “integrity of character.” If Mr. Burnham didn’t meet his Waterloo in Walter Rodney, he would have lasted a long time if natural death didn’t intervene.
He was a high class fox who knew when to hunt and when to stay home. I remember Burnham scored a fantastic coup against his opponents when Black Power advocate Kwame Sekou Toure (Stokley Carmichael) was invited by opposition groups to come to Guyana. Many felt Burnham would have been embarrassed by Carmichael, who would have castigated him for being a Western lackey.
Burnham had conceptual complexity. The people who invited Carmichael knew less of him than Burnham did. Carmichael came and praised Burnham.
Henry Kissinger will remain the most successful Secretary of State in American history. Using the knowledge he had of the brilliant German Chancellor Otto Van Bismarck, he successfully drove a wedge between the two communist giants, the USSR and China, thus maximizing the use of American influence in world affairs. The ignominious departure of Tony Blair showed he didn’t have many leadership qualities. Blair failed to sense the deep working class roots of the British Labour Party.
Basdeo Panday is another example of leadership failure. No leader is his right mind would have refused to seek a compromise with credible leaders in his/her own party given the fact that he only had one more seat in Parliament over the Opposition.
My honest opinion is that President Jagdeo lacks a majority of those leadership qualities. Leadership is about increasing one’s power base by ingenuity, popular policies, and visionary conceptualizations. Most of all, it is about achieving your goals without collateral damage. A smart leader will not pursue an unjust course of action if there are other options.
Someone in the PPP has not read Machiavelli correctly. The master wrote that a leader must appear brutal and cruel in order to prevent his subjects from rebelling. But there are parts of his seminal work, “The Prince,” in which he admonishes the leader to avoid unjust rule if you can.
If the PPP leaders had read the 17th chapter, they would have seen Machiavelli insisting that it is wise for the leader to appear humane and merciful.
This is where, I think, President Jagdeo has not read the textbooks very well. Power has moral dimensions to it. The use of those ethical compartments of power must be an essential part of a ruler’s repertoire. What President Jagdeo is doing is letting people know where power lies. It is not a strategically wise direction to take.
For example, one of the nine leadership qualities is “willingness to use power” but it does not denote the raw use of power just to prove a point. It means that the sovereign must sense when the time is right to act decisively. The wrong time may prove disastrous. It would appear that President Jagdeo may have misinterpreted this particular leadership trait.
President Jagdeo continues to demonstrate that he is the one with presidential power and he will exercise that power to achieve his goals. There is a big BUT here. BUT the utilization of power has many forms. The forms are important because, depending on the form, you can achieve maximum effect.
Throughout his presidential career, Mr. Jagdeo has chalked up minimum effect, the latest is the closure of Channel 6.
Every aspect of his ruling was ill-shaped and ill-timed. First, this is not the time for the Government to appear insensitive, given the fear we have at the moment with gunmen at the gates. Secondly, it was not in keeping with the moral content of power for President Jagdeo to preside over the fate of the station when he was the complainant. (What is not stated here is that the station successfully moved to the courts to challenge a move by President Jagdeo to delegate authority to Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon.)
As Minister of Information, he has statutory power to institute a formal hearing, presided over by another person.
Thirdly, the punishment was extremely harsh and has certainly damaged the credibility of the Government of Guyana in the eyes of the nation. Fourthly, it may end Opposition dialogues and stakeholders meetings with the President, because the Advisory Committee on Broadcasting (ACB), the Ethnic Relations Commission, and other similar institutions were invented to prevent arbitrary intervention by the Hobbesian Leviathan.
So when we have the Guyana Human Rights Commission (about to be started, I understand), will its rulings be accepted by the sovereign, or will it end up like the ACB?
