Social leadership?
(The universality of knowledge...)

September 08, 2004

What does it mean to say today that there is no "leadership" in the country? Leadership, I can recall saying elsewhere, is the exercise of putting vision and meaning and coherence to the struggles and sacrifices we undertake in daily existence.

Leadership involves the act of placing the options, the choices, and the parameters logically before the people.

Leadership answers the following questions:

For what are the people to sacrifice?

What are they to put aside today in order to be able to build tomorrow?

What, in fact, is the nature of this tomorrow to be envisioned? In other words, what kind of society will be built for the future, etc?

Leadership suggests a structuring of thought-processes, the clear capacity to face challenges both in thought and deed, to examine the inherent dynamics of problems and to think things through to logical conclusions.

In this sense leadership, if it is to be successful, must permeate all levels of society. In fact more than all else leadership is a social function.

It involves people, individuals as well as teams and committees or commissions, bringing to the table, to the big agenda, precise insights as to how development is to be conceptualised, designed and actualised or implemented at this particular moment in time and given the nature of the world that now exists.

In other words, it is the function of leadership to attach a world view to the day-to -day demands of the masses of people; leadership attaches universality to the specifics of the local situations.

The question to be asked is as follows: with the coming of Independence and our departure from colonialism, who in fact has comprised our social leadership and what have they to date accomplished, if anything?

The educated intelligentsia prepared by the local grammar schools, the UW of I, and metropolitan western universities have in fact over the years made up our social leadership, despite being on opposite sides of the national political and racial divide. And what have they as a distinct social grouping done?

(1) They transformed the ex-colonial State into a modern State, into being a major motor of development in medium-heavy and small manufacturing, in agriculture, the service and communications sectors, taking over whenever and wherever private investments, both local and foreign, prove inadequate,

(2) They made the State a facilitator of direct foreign investments in the offshore sector, ie oil and gas and petro-chemicals, without direct integration between this sector and the rest of the local economy.

Rents and taxes from the offshore sector make up the bulk of the income of the State.

(3) They have facilitated by fiscal and other policy measures the enhancement of the people's sector, ie co-operatives, credit unions, Unit Trust, etc.

(4) They expanded the entire social infrastructure of the country and have been struggling to dove-tail the education system with the requirements of the industrial sector.

(5) They have instituted a smooth divestment of State enterprises which is part of the liberalisation programme engendered by the multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the IDB.

Those have been the five basic planks of our intelligentsia, our social leadership. Whatever little pride we may have in ourselves and our country today stems largely from the results of these five basic planks

The failure of this social leadership is that there is no vision to take the country beyond that which has been established. They have taken us to the end of the road for which they have been so brilliantly prepared by their very "imperial schooling," to quote CLR James and later Lloyd Best.

The society is now floundering precisely because our very educated best cannot see further, cannot see beyond, until and unless they consciously and blatantly betrayed their schooling, or, as Best insists, they "escape the culture that has nurtured them."

At this point, having established the above-listed five fundamental planks, there is no longer any natural, intrinsic progressive element left to that intelligentsia and social leadership. For them to become useful today they must first betray their culture. Only few of them will ever be able to make that transformation.

For a new social leadership to be relevant, it must comprehend that the people from the very inception of the Caribbean civilisation were left out of the scheme of things, left out of all administrative and management arrangements.

The fundamental requirement now is that the people as a whole must be empowered to think, decide and act. Caribbean civilisation must become its own reason to be, the subjects of its own history.

The new leadership must initiate and help to nurture active, conscious communities where people live and where people work. Everything else will flow from this new perspective.

To stop the apparent floundering that we experience today, the time requires a leadership in critical mass that is not one-dimensional, legalistic, formalistic and uncreative in their ways of seeing and doing.

Such leadership must understand that what makes the world different today, what sets it apart from what existed before is the universality of knowledge. Long gone are the days when only the priests and the pundits knew.