Billionaire investor Warren Buffett says that, “You will know who was swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
Buffett is usually referring to companies, which look solid in good times and when a crisis hits they are exposed as shells, riven with debt, no reserves and bloated with unnecessary costs.
But at the heart of it is a caution to “leaders’ of any sort at every level.
"As long as there is no crisis you can look good, but when all hell breaks loose the boys will be seperated from the men....The corona epidemic is helping to sieve the grain from the chaff.
At the time of writing this, the US was fast reaching the 200,000 corona infections and had crossed the 5,000 death mark.
The US shouldn’t have been here but for lack of leadership.
Initially US President Donald Trump dismissed the impeding crisis as fear mongering by his political rivals, then he announced that chloroquin, the anti-malarial drug, would sort it out and just last week promised that the pandemic will be handled in time for Easter.
The only reason he, unlike UK Premier Boris Johnson doesn’t have the Covid-19, the disease caused by the corona virus, is that he has a particular aversion to shaking hands.
All the while his political base and the myriads who like to stick their heads in the sand, took him at face value and continued with life as usual, including throwing coming out spring parties on crowded beaches, just as the full extent of the pandemic was hitting western Europe.
Now the US’ infection rate is rising as if on steroids.
The challenge with the Corona virus is that full blow symptoms show after two weeks but a victim can have been spreading the virus for at least a week.
So the numbers we are seeing today are a the result of the past sins.
But back to the issue of leadership.
The district chairman of Bunyangabo this week showed us what our typical understanding of power is.
"Power, the ability to influence people and events, is a useful ingredient of leadership. But its most manifest sign in Uganda is in the people who have power’s ability to break the rules, to be above the law...
Forget the mealy mouthed self-help gurus who counsel “servant leadership”, our leaders measure their place on the ladder by how much they can get away with.
This includes powerful people breaking their loved ones out of quarantine, ignoring isolation procedures and the winner – seating in a hall with hundred others as parliament did last week, to complain that the governmnet is not taking their safety very seriously!
The Bunyagabu chairman would very well have got away with his crime, were it not that he was recorded on video slapping the Resident District Commissioner (RDC) who was trying to enforce a presidential directive.
By the way the RDCis the president’s direct representative in the district, so to slap the RDC means …?
Country’s around the world are having to respond to the pandemic, their ability to do so depends on how they have managed their affairs, how leadership has been exercised.
Western Europe’s economies are committing billions of dollars to keep people in work, offer some relief to those who are out of work and the most vulnerable members of their society.
They can afford to do this because they have built up credible reserves, kept their debt levels under co ntrol and built local resource mobilisation mechanisms to finance their ambitions.
"For a poor country like Uganda hopefully this pandemic will finally drive home the wisdom of a more determined drive to build tax revenues and mobilise savings....
Believe it or not we are not the worst. Some of our neighbours apart from being poor are burdened with huge open market debt, that apart frrom the grandstanding they will be hard pressed to live up to the pledges to their people.
The danger with the corona pandemic is that its not clear when it will come under control. As long as there is a corner of the globe that still has infected people, we will always be in danger of a re-emergence.
A vaccine may provide hope but realistic estimates are that this will not happen before the middle of next year.
"Stories of reinfection in China offers no solace. It was hoped that once contracted the virus some immunity may built up against a re-occurence but that does not seem to be true...
What this means is that the leaders who fall short will continue to be exposed, because to battle the corona pandemic will require consistent, unflinching and resolute leadership not flashes of brilliant grandstanding.
