Thank goodness our president is an exception among the world’s distasteful leaders
The world is not overly supplied with good leaders at the moment. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro is being called a mass murderer for his ineptitude in addressing the coronavirus. In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson supports his right-hand man Dominic Cummings, who went for a walk in the woods and drove across a large swathe of the country despite this violating lockdown regulations and despite knowing he had Covid-19 symptoms.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin continues to evade allegations that the country’s infection rates have been vastly underreported.
And in the US, President Donald Trump — in addition to endorsing possibly dangerous drugs not cleared for use against Covid-19, as well as a host of other violations too numerous to mention here — has tried to take control of social media because he isn’t allowed to make violent threats on Twitter.
Despite other issues plaguing his administration, President Cyril Ramaphosa looks like a saint compared with this lot.
When communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams broke level 5 lockdown regulations by having lunch with a colleague, she was immediately fined and suspended. Johnson might have been off sick at the time; if he knew about this it might have helped him work out how to deal with Cummings.
Among many other things, this pandemic has shown us that politicians are as susceptible as everyone else to exceptionalism.
This newly fashionable term used to refer somewhat ironically to something merely unusual. Now it describes the person who thinks it’s OK for them to walk around without a protective mask because “it might not be safe for them but it doesn’t apply to me”.
When leaders treat themselves as exceptions, their followers feel vindicated in emulating them. This is why leaders are called leaders and followers are called followers.
In the US, the contagiousness of exceptionalist leadership are made manifest in the foul behaviour of Trump supporters who cough up phlegm and spit it over those who exhort them to wear masks.
Their leader’s outrageous behaviour has given these oiks licence to reject the rules attempting to stem the tide of death (more than 100,000 in the US so far) as an unacceptable assault on their freedom.
In the UK, there are probably people who have followed in Cummings’s lawbreaking footsteps, although there seems to be more of a backlash against him than there is against Trump.
A neon sign on a British highway this week flashed the words: “Stay alert. Control the virus. Save lives.” Underneath it a matching sign had been put up that read: “Except Dominic Cummings.”
On the other side of this leadership divide are President Macky Sall of Senegal and his cabinet, who began forming contingency plans for the coronavirus pandemic in January. They have been outstandingly effective in their response to the crisis, earning global praise not only for their health interventions and economic relief programme, but for constantly and compassionately communicating with the country’s citizens.
Is it possible for a leader to be effective without setting an example? Leadership academies shout: “No!”
Try searching Google for “leading by example” and almost 900-million results come back, all along the lines of “The best managers always lead by example” and “Like it or not, you are always leading by example”.
In searching for an exception that might show the ability of a non-exemplary leader to be effective, I came across the persistent myth that Winston Churchill, while leading the UK during World War 2, sacrificed the city of Coventry because evacuating the area might alert the Germans to the fact that British intelligence had cracked the Enigma code, which might have scuppered the plans that would eventually end the war.
The story has repeatedly been debunked, as has the conspiracy theory that Churchill saved his own mother while allowing others to die. If true, it could have provided a case study of a leader who, torn between what he asked of his people and the special duty of care owed to his family, might have taken an exceptionalist course for reasons that were at least understandable.
But this is hypothetical. Such extreme situations of moral conflict are rare.
It seems fair to say that leaders who fiddle while Rome burns, who eat cake while their subjects starve, who go for long walks and drives while the rest of the population is under lockdown, who set one standard of acceptable speech and behaviour for themselves and another for everybody else — never mind those who refuse to listen to scientists or wear masks in the face of a pandemic — do not deserve to be called leaders at all.