The handicaps of leadership

THE EDITOR, Sir: WHEN PORTIA Simpson Miller, then prime minister of Jamaica, was asked by that sharp journalist from TVJ, the ‘what if’ question, “What if you lost the election?”, she could have answered in many ways. “I don’t expect to, but if the unlikely happens, I will do this, that or the other”. Instead, she scoffed at the question. “Do I look like a loser?”

The clear idea was the stupidity of the question. The reality made the answer, not the question, stupid. Mrs Simpson Miller lost the election and a lot of credibility. So why that particularly stupid answer?

Because leaders must never admit the possibility of defeat? Must never own up to being wrong? Is this the basis for the cult of the ‘strong and wrong’ leadership we seem to foster? I do not think it is in Jamaica’s best interest for us to produce and glorify this brand of leadership.

The art of good leadership demands humility, self-criticism, and a very real and practical love of land and people.

WINNING STREAK

Which leads to the second unfortunate feature of the last general election from my perspective. I think the Jamaica Labour Party was in a winning streak from the moment the People’s National Party decided not to debate. And Mr Andrew Michael Holness, in traditional street political combat style, took off with a vengeance. I am not sure that he could contain himself at that point. The words flowed with the same type of passionate eloquence that I watched when Michael Manley was in full flight.

When Holness spoke of Sister P as the old generation, comparing ages in a most ungentlemanly fashion – the past – I remembered Manley’s “five flights” daily. Again, there was the impulse to cancel the past and to begin all over from scratch.

We do not learn from the past. We wipe it out. So we are forever beginning anew.

What a self-made handicap!

PETER ABRAHAMS