A question of leadership

Experience has taught me that the success or failure of any enterprise or entity always depends on the strengths or weaknesses of people, particularly those entrusted with a leading role.

We constantly read of success stories of companies, which strike gold thanks to the vision, wisdom, and astute leadership of those who run them. On analysing the factors for success of such companies, one will immediately realise that its leader had more than one finger in the pie. Of course, the same applies to the other side of the coin: failure. You do not have to be very wise to discover that poor leadership leads to disastrous results.

The principle of "good leadership leads to success" applies to all aspects of life. Leading an NGO is as important as leading a medium-sized company or a local community. Once you are entrusted with such a responsibility you are expected to carry it to the best of your ability.

Your performance as president of the Ghaqda tal-Hamiem will be under the scrutiny of its members as much as that of a company's chairman or of a political party leader. Amazingly, a bad performance as a leader of a group of relatively minor importance might one day come back to haunt you the moment you are vying for a highly-paid position in a company.

Of course, the more important the position of leadership, the more rigorous the choice becomes. Let's take the selection of an archbishop to lead the Maltese Church. It took ages to choose a successor for Mgr Joseph Mercieca. God knows how many hours of deliberation were spent by those whose responsibility it is to make such choices. But who can say that these people made a bad choice?

Choosing a political leader is also a hard task. Party delegates entrusted with such a choice normally keep in mind that the person they vote for should be able to lead the party to electoral victory, because that is, admittedly, quite important. You cannot be a party that is perpetually in Opposition. That would be equivalent to having a player who never plays a game of football and is forever tied to the reserves bench.

What is very significant about this process is that the elector may be choosing a prime-minister-in-waiting or indeed even a Prime Minister, as the UK Labour Party delegates did when voting for Gordon Brown.

However, what if the party's electors opt for someone who, they believe, may be able to lead their party to victory even though he or she is not of prime ministerial material? I do not know what the Malta Labour Party delegates had in mind back in 1992, when they preferred Alfred Sant to someone like Lino Spiteri.

Dr Sant did win them a general election in 1996. However he failed miserably as prime minister. He may be a good party strategist, but many, including Labourites I know, doubt his credentials as a possible prime minister, even though they know that the electorate may indeed give him a second chance to lead the country.

What the electorate needs to realise now is that this is no game. How can one trust someone who messed up the country's finances in just 22 months at a time when the country is prospering economically? How can one trust someone who was so much against Malta joining the European Union, with almost a billion euros allocated to Malta thanks to EU membership?

On what grounds should we buy Dr Sant's promise that a new Labour government would halve the electricity surcharge, when he increased water and electricity rates by much more than that when the international price of oil was a sixth of what it is today?

Lawrence Gonzi may have lost a number of local electoral races since he was elected leader of the Nationalist Party, and thus prime minister, in 2004. However, not even the staunchest Labourite can deny that Dr Gonzi has managed to establish a good track record in government.

He managed to make our country eligible to join the Eurozone in a relatively short time. Under his leadership the government has managed to attract a record amount of foreign investment to Malta. Dr Gonzi's government is continuously pumping money into the education sector.

Under his leadership the rate of unemployment is going down, despite the closing down of a number of manufacturing companies, such as Bortex and VF. Despite problems in the tourism sector, a string of decisions by the Gonzi administration has managed to reverse a downward trend in this sector and the prospects are looking good.

Producing a thick, glossy compilation of policy documents is one thing; producing tangible results is another. Leading a party to an electoral victory, marginal as it may be, is very different from leading the country. This may prove a hard nut to crack for someone who has already lost all his teeth in just 22 months!