It’s being more than 9 years ( year 2002) yet feels like yesterday ( time just flies) since I finished my 10th grade. We had just taken our Send Up exam and me and my friends Sachin, Nirmal and Sumit were on the way to Hungry Eye Momo restaurant in Bharatpur ( a popular destination for youths), Chitawan. On the way back, we decided to walk past Bharatpur Medical College. There were tall concrete buildings both sides of the road and squeezed amid these buildings was a small hut. While passing, I saw a girl (perhaps 10 years old) reciting Samuel Taylor’s, “Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink”. What also stroke me was, she was reading on kerosene lamp while buildings around her hut were lighting on bright electric lights. For some reasons, don’t know why, that memory is still fresh and that small girl’s diligence, her parent’s poverty and her dreams (perhaps) have forced me to picture our real Nepal. Like that girl’s recitation, we are also facing a serious leadership crisis in Nepal. It’s like, “Politicians, politicians everywhere, nor a single leader to lead.” Every single day, what all we hear are political gimmicks, foul-crying and bickering and we are fed up with this.
A good leader after all has a vision, strong willpower and the extraordinary ability to catch the flow of time, which we still have not seen these merits on any of our seasoned politicians yet. Time and again, majority of the political leaderships have failed to transcend into good leaders, though they have succeeded to drive the changes most notably the Janaandolan-2. They have however, failed to institutionalize the changes that people had fought for. There is no doubt there are many corrupt souls out there, yet even those who are clean have failed to meet people’s expectations. Even Prachanda who spearheaded insurgency (don’t want to comment on the merits of it now) in just within 10 years has turned himself as another seasoned politician, far short of a true leadership.
Last week, I was reading an article about Ulseyes Grant, the legendary Lincon’s American-civil war general and also the US president, who defeated the Confederation and saved the union. However, his presidency is rated as one of the worst by Historians due to rampant corruption and Grant’s inability to go with the flow of time, and lack of pragmatism. He was truly a wartime leader, but turned out to be a very bad manager. What we have also seen in current Nepal is also the lack of true managerial skills in political leaders, and that’s partly because majority of them are more like wartime leaders, who have failed to transform into peacetime pragmatics. In addition, these old generations utterly failed to embrace the needs of 21st century. Same old coterie politics, old mindset and arrogance. And now is the time that we young generations step into the nation building processes. Like one of my friends Arjun commented, it’s only the wine bottle was changed, but not the wine in our national politics. So, hey Facebook and Twitter generations, no matter where we live ( in Nepal or abroad) but do share similar vision of prosperous Nepal, let’s bring our hands, minds and hearts together : we sure can replace these retired generations and create the society of 21st century which is founded on merit, equality and justice.
Sushil Khadka
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