Excuses tarnish the image of a leader

The campaign slogan run by Sprite a few years ago always holds true to me in life: “Image is nothing, thirst is everything, obey your thirst!”

In political and business leadership, however, the slogan should be paraphrased: “Image is everything, thirst for power even more so: obey your thirst.” Two things will always hold true, in political and business leadership image is everything and power is absolutely everything.

I was inspired to this line of thought as I read the spellbinding book titled A Thousand Hills by Stephen Kinzer, who writes about Rwanda’s rebirth and the man who dreamed it.

The book is a well balanced historical analysis of President Paul Kagame’s life before, during and after the genocide that shot his leadership prowess into the limelight based on the writer’s research and interviews with the leader and other notable actors in the drama that became notoriously known as 100 days of genocide from April to June 1994.

A key player was the Canadian military commander Romèo Dallaire who, in 1993, was appointed as the Commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda.

Dallaire’s boss was none other than Kofi Annan, who was the head of the department of peacekeeping operations at UN.

Kinzer writes of Dallaire: “Friends had warned him…. that Annan and his colleagues were ‘incompetent boobs who kept bankers’ hours and disappeared when situations in the field came to a head.’ Within the course of a year, Dallaire came to understand why Kofi Annan’s image was so tainted.

At the height of the genocide, 10 Belgian peacekeepers were killed and Dallaire immediately called Mr Annan with a view to request for a bigger and better armed contingent which had a tougher mandate to intervene and provide security to the victims of the bloodthirsty killers.

Annan’s response was simply, No. Dallaire was asked not to take sides and told further that it was up to the Rwandans to sort things out for themselves.

Image is really a two-way mirror. One the one side of the mirror is the Kenyan.

If you ask the average Kenyan who Kofi Annan is, she will tell you that he is the man who came to rescue Kenya from the brink of civil war after the December 2007 elections.

On the other side of the mirror is the Rwandan. Kofi Annan is the man who failed to let the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda convert its mandate from a paper pushing bureaucracy to saving lives of victims of genocide.

It is arguable that the two sides of this Ghanaian coin are a reflection of lessons learnt, a commitment that never again would he watch while a country went to flames. Frankly, I look to politics to give me the answer.

The greatest objective for any leader, whether political or business, is to remain relevant.

Having retired from the highest UN position a black man had ever achieved, Mr Annan had to stay relevant. Brokering — or being seen to broker — peace talks in a country that has significant regional importance for the US and UK provided that relevance.

But that is political leadership, what about business leadership?

A few weeks ago, the Strathmore Business School held a well-attended forum for sustaining economic development through real estate.

The key note speaker was Mr Philip Kisia, the Town Clerk of Nairobi City Council.

Mr. Kisia, prior to that day, had an illustrious career as the CEO of the Nairobi Central Business District Association (NCBDA) and then the CEO of the Kenyatta International Conference Centre.

The latter role did wonders for his image, as what was reflected was the utter transformation of a dilapidated and barely functioning city skyscraper into a modern and professionally run conference facility.

When Mr Kisia took the podium, that image may as well have been reflected on a stagnant pool of water as it quickly evaporated.

He blamed virtually every ill that bedevilled the City Council on the mysterious “You People” as he made reference to the crowd that sat before him.

From flippant statements like “You People are the ones who build in Kiambu not us” to “You people are the ones who give briefcases to town planners” and the best one of which was “You don’t like hawkers, but they are produced by you people.”

Mr Kisia surprised the listeners with his “you people” debate and completely left a large number of participants bewildered as to what transformation had occurred in him within the whitewashed colonial walls of the City Council.

I stopped counting the number of “you people” allegations when he got to ten, by which time his slant had moved to wondering why the corporate bodies represented in the room could not give money to the City Council to improve its Information Technology infrastructure and even banks would not lend to the Council, but in the same breadth he stated that 80 per cent of his revenues go to paying salaries due to his bloated headcount leaving him with very little money to do anything else.

The silver lining in the “dodging-responsibility” cloud came in the form of Mr Kisia’s boss, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Local Government, Mr Sammy Kirui.

Collective responsibility

The soft-spoken but highly knowledgeable PS was conversely effective.

Every sentence began with “We” and he exemplified the notion of collective responsibility of the Government by taking the time to define the role of the Local Government Ministry as well as why some of the initiatives that Mr Kisia had stated as having been put in a cabinet paper required cabinet approval.

Mr Kirui’s effective discourse gave the crowd a far better understanding of his message rather than his opinion.

More importantly, two very different leadership styles were inadvertently displayed: one leader who managed his business by blaming everyone else for what was going wrong and the other who managed business by assuming responsibility for everything that went on within it.

Mr Kirui clearly understands the yoke that image lays to bear on leaders and when to step up to the plate and project the acceptance of responsibility.

A number of leaders on the other hand clearly subscribe to the original Sprite slogan, “Image is nothing, thirst is everything, obey your thirst!

Carol.musyoka@bungani.com