By Istahiil Beysaare

How do we cultivate homegrown talented folks from among ourselves, and how do we identify this talent?  

You can't make sense of your role as a leader unless you know yourself first. Look to others for guidance but be true to who you are, really. Great leaders have to be capable of inspiring others, either by offering an exciting vision of the future, even if it turns out to be the dark and perverted vision offered by Hitler, and by that token a dull speaker like Bill Gates can inspire people with his vision of the future. Or by appealing to people's idealism and desire to do good as John Kennedy did when he asked America's young generation to ask themselves "not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country," or by reaching out to people to reassure and offer solidarity as he did when he proclaimed, "Ich bin ein Berliner".

I thought about my former supervisor once more. He was a well liked leader, not inspiring perhaps, but respected. He was calm and predictable in the way he behaved, not prone to fits of anger. Good qualities in a leader in times of crisis - an anchor to hang onto. His behavior was also fair and scrupulously objective in his treatment of other people and their ideas. Not prone to making preconceived judgments - he listened sympathetically and respectfully to others and his people were happy to bring him their suggestions. Most importantly of all he was NOT so interested in power so he could take decisions for the common good. I pondered on this because we truly need a leader just like him in our homeland.

Mankind had for thousands of generations picked out their leaders from among small bands of hunter gatherers. They had been successful in doing this, for their genes survived while the genes of their less successful brethren died out. The world, however, is full of poor and erratic leaders in spite of this. Is it because they are swayed by the lure of power in making their decisions? And how do they get to be bosses in the first place. Is it because they are successful in ingratiating themselves with the people that do have power?

Perhaps part of the problem is that a decision regarding who becomes a leader in a country is normally governed by an up-down process of selection while the million-year- old evolutionary process of selecting leaders through a down-up process rarely happens. Given this strategy what can we do to implement it? How do we cultivate home grown talented folks from among our people, and how do we identify this talent? How do we involve the shop floor in the selection process? And how do we canvass the people there, and engage them in a dialogue to find the leaders of quality?

In this connection great leaders do not always make themselves but rather they reluctantly have greatness thrust upon them by their peers such as happened at the American continental congress which threw up men like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and other extraordinary men. Would these men have become great leaders in their society in normal times? And in answer to that question put to me all those years ago I would now say that great men or women are people who can turn the tide of history for the good of everyone while ordinary mortals like me and you are simply carried along by it.

In that light Napoleon could have been a greater man but his unsated lust for power undid him in the end. I hope our Next Somaliland President doesn't become the Next Napoleon of East Africa. He was in this sense a failed leader, and not the first, nor the last.

Leadership is a matter of how to be NOT how to do it. In the end, it is the quality and character of the leader that determines performance and results.

Let's make sure that our next leader is a super leader and not a blooper leader.

So Long Somalilanders.

Miss_Beysaare@ hotmail.com