Leadership of talk and tale
The trouble with leadership is that it is unavoidable and inevitable. It is also indispensable as it is inexpendible. Whoa! That is a lot of adjectives clustered all into one, and perhaps needs more seminal forewords. Aah! But that is exactly the point of how leadership has evolved in recent years, globally, with no exception.
Before you jump to castigate this as one of those needlessly fulminating op-eds, please pause, and think again.
By definition, leadership is the action of leading a group of people or an organisation. Those who take up leadership are known as leaders. Rudimentary stuff, right? Not so much when it comes to their function for they are the people to whom others turn to in times of crises or distress, they provide beacons where dark phases engulf a people and their aspirations, they stand in the way of peace or war, and pretty much chart the course of how this group or organisation fares, in aggregate.
Today’s leaders are not leaders by merit, well generally speaking at least, they are purposefully planted figure heads who are supposed to serve a predetermined wider agenda (of course for the common good, what else?), they harbour deep seated sentiments of leaving behind their own legacies, and their world view of things is seldom straight forward. Again, your interjection is valid but clouded. Your reference of diplomacy and what leaders are taught to do, more often than not, leaves entire populations in abject poverty and destitution, their high level connections end up benefitting a handful while the majority basks in sufferings of all kinds.
This is not to steal away all their credibility, but the reality that faces us today is that the system that makes up a leadership environment, is dodgy at best and deviates tremendously from the path of its original purpose.
Upon studying the dictates of Imam Ali’s letters to Malik ibn al-Harith al-Ashtar, a salient feature that keeps emerging now and again, is summed up simply as ‘Even if you are a leader, you ae just a servant of God’ , and unless leaders learn to live at par with their subjects, know more about their issues, do real things to alleviate their plights, and then foster positive vibes and values amongst all, only the can we comfortably relinquish this claim
