Voting for inspiration

Over and above all things, voters look for leadership that inspires; and it will be the case in this election year.
All elected leaders change the course of voters’ lives; the inspirational leaders will motivate their followers while the demotivating leaders will deepen despair among their supporters.
Leaders that inspire tend to add to the public good and therefore enhance personal life among the electorate. Leaders that cause despair tend to take away from the greater good and ultimately frustrate the personal life of the voters.
Voters worldwide are immensely proud to identify with outstanding leaders and are wont to draw quotable quotes from them; and where the electorate are ashamed of nondescript leaders they will take psychological refuge in anyone else (even an entertainer) who inspires in citizens a sense of national honour.
Voters who think will cast their ballots for candidates that inspire self-belief and enable them to see a different tomorrow for all.
Voters who do not think will cast their vote even for aspirants that provoke feelings of hostility, hatred, shame and distress.
Writing about what went wrong in Africa, Harry MwaangaNkumbula said in chapter three of Goodwin Mwangilwa’s 1982 biography on ‘The Old Lion of Zambia’:
“There is a great deal of dissatisfaction among the people because of the bad systems of government that have emerged. The root cause of these troubles are the leaders themselves.”
The nationalist spoke of the kind of Zambia he wanted to build had he become president: “I had in mind a Zambia which could accommodate all interests, apart from the isms that I find detestable.”
The on-going constitutional debates are proof that Zambia is still struggling to accommodate ‘all interests.’ Inspirational leaders make room for ‘all interests’ and they do nothing to exclude or isolate those interest groups they do not like.
Such considerations make our August general elections an audit on the governments and individual leaders we have had since 1964.
Steven R. Covey’s 2004 book The Eighth Habit—From Effectiveness to Greatness is all about leaders inspiring others to find their voice.
He acknowledges that “at its most elemental and practical level—leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.”
BOOST
There is much evidence that our political parties usually fail to boost the worth and potential of their own members, and their candidates hardly ever deal with matters of motivating and inspiring those they are elected to serve when they accede to high office.
As such the followers and voters do not show themselves to be inspired and inspiring. One proof of this is in the persistent violence of party youths who demonstrably have no vision for the future.
Dr Covey maintains that leadership is an ‘enabling’ art, and as such it enables all other arts and professions to work.
Consider how vital this principle is because all professions and vocations are ‘enabled’ by leadership. Where they are ‘disabled’ by leadership there has been a failure in the person(s) leading.
Leadership that inspires will ‘enable’ new generations to rise up, and visionaries to find their space. Leadership ‘disables’ if it cripples societies, families and individuals such that they fail to find their own place.
This is the thinking voters need to buy into, and elect leaders who truly and genuinely inspire. Voters should get into a mentality of voting with purpose in their heads and passion in their hearts.
Leaders such as presidents are not expected to resolve all problems in the national life of a republic—but they must inspire their countrymen and women to reach hard towards a future.
It is not inspiring for a president to keep looking backwards and blaming his predecessor for current troubles in the economy or the polity of the republic.
And it certainly increases despair when a government spends colossal amounts in resources to crucify the immediate past president, which Zambia and other African countries have experienced in the past.
For an aspiring leader to be inspirational also calls for actions that the ever-observant public appreciate.
Leaders are public figures; therefore there is absolutely nothing that they do that is hidden. What voters see can either inspire or cause hope to expire.
But then, those who take elective office with unspoken personal agendas will not care about inspiring voters or developing others to emerge as leaders. And if any percentage of the candidates for political and civic office this year is running for unknown motives, inspiring citizens will mean nothing to them.
DEVELOP
Does your organization develop leaders?
That is the title of chapter 14 of John Adair’s 1988 book Effective Leadership, and it is a loaded question.
He observes here: “We should think of education or training for leadership as happening at different stages in a person’s career. The foundations should have been laid before a person presents himself for a job involving the management of people.”
We can observe that families should be the first place where leaders are raised, moulded, groomed and mentored. Societies and institutions ought to build on an initial sound and healthy foundation laid at home.
Since party cadres traditionally display a total lack of leadership vision and potential, it does mean there is scanty inspiration radiating to them from their overseers. Cadres victimize opponents in other parties because they are themselves victims of political manipulation and exploitation.
Tomorrow the self-same cadres will file nomination papers and run for elective office at all levels, but they will do so without any capacity to inspire because they will have been moulded to stone, machete and club their way forward. Politics definitely has far more to offer them than the prevalent thuggery.
In fact the position of all party members and their leaders is so shallow that immediately any one of them defects to another political party, those who remain will always describe the deserter as worthless and insignificant instead of mourning that person’s exit.
Leadership formation should have been happening at various stages of a person’s career and life, if we should follow Adair who is considered the father of modern leadership and management concepts. If that formation has not happened because the future leaders have emerged from broken homes, with absentee mothers and fathers, ours is the loss.
Elections are not about today’s contestants only, but about where we shall all be tomorrow, on their account.
Their actions will inspire innovation and creativity in us all; or their deeds will waste our hopes and dreams, in the process aggravating our socioeconomic and socio-political condition.
These considerations make the August election a choice for inspiring leadership.
DICTATORSHIP
A vote can decide whether after August Zambia will see the face of dictatorship or emerge to higher levels of open democracy.
Dr Robinson Nabulyato, notably the longest-serving speaker in the Commonwealth at 21 years of services, said this in his 2008 book African Realties: A Memoir:
“The leaders of totalitarian states—where all criticism is silenced through various means including the disappearance and lynching of opponents—are obsessed with protecting their own positions. They do this by misusing the taxpayers’ money to surround themselves with police, army and other security forces with which they threaten and frighten away even the sensible and dignified citizens who are simply bent on providing them with good advice.
“As a result, these leaders become isolated from the true realities of life and turn into tyrannical dictators, examples of whom are so abundant in Africa.”
He stated that most tyrants or dictators aim at the humiliation of their subjects, for they know that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anyone.
“The dictator desires that all his subjects should be powerless and incapable of action. But repression only sharpens and hardens resistance. Thus, political leaders should not turn their parties or security forces into instruments of oppression. For to do so is to invite theirown downfall.”
That is a most uninspiring portrait of a president on the African continent—yet another reason why we face an election which ought to be about inspiring leadership.
In today’s Africa, most countries have become multiparty democracies; but totalitarian rule persists even in such settings. Intolerance still explodes in different ways on the national scene, purveyed by some ruling parties and rendering everyone else powerless.
The ballot is intended to empower, not to make voters powerless. If there is a sense that some presidential candidates stand for dictatorship in a pluralist context; or that they stand for the ultimate disempowerment of voters, it is best that voters vote their eyes open.
The voter must collect all possible information; find out what is the manifesto of the political parties; find out how truthful and sincere are the campaigns and contenders in this elections race.
Candidates that are uninspiring should be ignored and bypassed for those truly inspiring and imaginative aspirants. At times this will call the voter to cast the ballot not for a party but for the most enterprising individual on the scene.
Michael Cassidy in his 1991 book, The Politics of Love, centred on the emergent South Africa of Nelson Mandela, wrote about how Milton Obote’s people in Uganda liberated the citizenry from Idi Amin’s oppression—only to massacre 200,000 Baganda people in the Luwere Valley, six months after liberating them!
Leadership that turns on its own people and massacres them physically or psychologically or emotionally is a disaster that voters can prevent from taking power; or remove if it shows its true colours while in power.
THINK
The naked truth is that in Zambia, let alone the rest of the continent, we think in strange ways and vote for reasons different from those that vote in the developed north.
We tend to elect tribe, social status, revenge, grudge, money, gossip, lies and everything that is not objectively known and appreciated about a candidate. Before the newly assented constitution, we re-elected the same candidates no matter how often they crossed the floor and forced parliamentary by-elections on us.
That makes for a misguided, helpless, powerless and fearful vote.
That is a vote cast for reasons of blind loyalty based on all the wrong and changeable reasons. That blind loyalty has seen voters follow politicians across the whole landscape, hopping from one party to the other and destroying every sense of principle that leaders should sell to their followers.
If only we as voters could actively seek information so that we make informed choices, as Proverbs 4:7 inspires us to seek knowledge and understanding and be willing to spend for it!
Evidence is everywhere that we vote without knowledge; we sell our voters’ cards without knowledge; we defect from party to party without knowledge—proving time and again that we have little understood what the ballot is all about.
Probably it is time to research into whether the ballot actually means anything at all to the majority of voters in the Zambia of the Third Millennium.
It was South African ANC leader Rev Frank Chikane who said, “There is no way you can be born white and think differently unless by grace, and there is no way in which you can be born black and think differently, unless by grace.” Email: all.information@ymail.com