When people lead, leaders must follow!

J. Roughan

2 April 2009

Honiara   

                      

President Obana's recent election fundamentally changed the rules of how future political leaders will be chosen. His election was much more than a political event than a new way ordinary citizens gain the political upper hand. This time last year, for instance, it was impossible to think that a young, black men with a strange sounding name had any place to go but down in the American  presidential politics. The country's  leaders were convinced and they already made their minds up. They had basically decided who would sit in Washington's seat of power and all other hopefuls well as might pack their bags, write finish to their political ambitions and look for something else to do. How wrong they were!

 

In our own little part of the world, many citizens still read the present in much the same terms.They labour under the illusion that the nation's well being rests with the modern day political leader--really only a bit more than 30 years in the making--rather than with the majority of its people. Government's White Paper on Political Party Integrity illustrates this point with little ambiguity.

 

To make things clear as possible, achieving political stability is never found in the hearts of  those--politicans, hangers on, cronies, etc.--who consistently use the nation as a private piggy bank. They have too much at stake to seek steep, radical and fundamental change. Tinkering around at the political edges--preferential voting, tighter financial control of campaign funding, etc.--is something they can get their teeth into. Setting up, controlling political parties and funding them is something else again.

 

Even more fundamental is their dislike at the thought of bringing ordinary citizens into the heart of this debate. No, the typical citizen must be kept at arm's length from the political process. Yes, fob them off with project monies, help them with social payments when hard times hit them and above all, act as walking Automatic Teller Machines. Yes, allow citizens to push buttons to access dollar outflows to tide them over in hard times but keep them far from the heart of the political system.

 

Citizens basic and really only job, every four years, is to vote and then get out of the way to let the professionals--parliamentarians, government itself and caucus members--to take up the reigns and lead the nation without much interference from the outside. Professional politicans seem to have forgotten that this very scenario has been followed for more than 30 years and was one of the basic causes of our Social Unrest years (1998-2003) and dare to say it, the Chinatown Burn Down three years ago, in 2006.

 

Yet, Solomons people have shown themselves remarkably accomplished in a number of areas of national life.  Take education for instance!Fifty years ago, as was mentioned in this space in past years, most village people had only the faintest idea what this whole enterprise called education was all about. When I stepped ashore at Tarapaina on Small Mala in 1959 and started a tiny school it was like climbing a steep mountain. The school fee, at the time, was two sticks of tobacco I gave to a father to allow his small son/daughter to attend school.

 

In less than 50 years, however, the nation has grown, matured and come of age from the sticks of tobacco era to one of very high school fees of thousands and thousands of dollars.  Not dozens of school children but literally thousands regularly attend class, taught by trained teachers and continue to do this for years on end. Although governments of the time, both colonial as well as local, took some credit for this remarkable transformation of people's understanding of the worth of education, most credit must come from people themselves.

 

Because the country's education enterprise has been a slow and at times painful step by step process not easily grasped even by those who have gained the most out of it, our political elite and their followers, turning to our most recent past history gives much the same reading. Lest we forget, RAMSI's intervention, as necessary as it was at the time, was primarily focused on saving the government much less on bringing peace, stability and order in the village sector. 

 

Of course the terrible events on Guale's Weather Coast was there for all to see. But the rest of the nation, more than 95% of the population, understood quite clearly that if they didn't take care of their olos, fed the kids, guard their woman folk, protect peace, then who else would do it. The Solomon's police force was in free fall, the government of the day dithered and the rest of the world had basically resigned the country to history's trash heap. No, it was the ordinary village citizen that kept the bulk of the nation feed, secure and protected with little or no help from the outside. 

 

It's these same people who must be brought into the heart of the present political debate, to establish how they would treat political parties and what suggestions and insights these people would gladly give to their professional political leaders. Yes, when people lead, then leaders must follow.