Which crop of people become good leaders?

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graduationGhanaians? infatuation with higher paper qualifications has necessitated this publication. In Ghana, it is almost an obligatory, although an unofficial, tradition, to kowtow to those possessing higher education qualifications. When it comes to someone having a Ph.D., one has to hold them in high esteem, giving them obeisance as one would give to tin-gods.

As soon as one obtains their Ph.D., they will insist on being addressed as Doctor or Doc (abbreviation for Doctor, thus, a Ph.D. holder but not a Medical doctor). Woe betides any inferior degree holder who refuses to address them as such. Thinking, acquiring higher degrees of any nature makes them two inches taller than their less fortunate, less educated compatriots; they jealously ensure people identify them by the impressive titles they prefix to their names.

However, in the Whiteman?s land where I am domiciled, people are not frivolously addressed by prefixes to their names in their ordinary lives as they are contrarily prevalent in Ghana. Attaching pride to the mere qualification than what they can do with their qualification is where I totally disagree with them. This is just by the way.

In Ghana today, most of our traditional areas require University degree holders to be enstooled as paramount chiefs. The inhabitants, or to be more precise, the kingmakers, do suffer from unnecessary peer pressure when it comes to nominating and electing a new chief for their traditional area. They are always made to believe, although falsely, that someone with a higher qualification is more preferable to one with little, or without any, qualification.

Here is where my question comes into prominence – Do highly qualified persons always make good leaders? Depending on their field of speciality, and if and only if, they are ingenious to come up with things that will enhance society, better the collective interests of their people, then yes. But are our current traditional leaders of that sort? My practical observations about the chiefs, their conducts in both their private and public lives, make them less appealing to the people they rule. Their actions, corruptibility, insatiable greediness, selfishness, authoritarianism, and their propensity to bully, sidestepping customary laws and usages, practicing nepotism and rendering unfair verdicts during arbitrations, make nonsense anyone?s quest for a degree holder to be a paramount chief.

Once more, I would choose my village head (Odikro), Nana Yaw Ampong of Asiampa, if he were alive, hundred times over and above our current educated, but completely dishonest, selfish and mostly myopic chiefs. He never even had a single day?s formal education throughout his live before he departed peacefully to the land of the ancestors; however, he was able to unite the inhabitants of the village to undertake services of common interest to all. He was an honest and a caring village head who respected every person at the village, whether young or old. He was not a bully. He was not a cheat. He never ever aspired to appropriate to himself what was not legally his, unlike most of the Ghanaian chiefs and traditional leaders of today. I could see him as being comparatively wiser in the execution of his duties than most officially highly educated chiefs of today.

Are not the highly educated chiefs with University degrees that are seen everyday selling the same piece of urban land to more than one person at a time? Are they not duping their subjects every now and then? Are they not the very people that had become tyrants, disrespecting their subjects? I can go on and on revealing their despicable weaknesses until thy Kingdom come.

It is just all emptiness, the idea that modern day chiefs must be highly educated. Most of our educated chiefs are just nobodies to me, as long as they selfishly pursue their own agenda. In future, I shall elaborate on this issue to the better understanding of my readers. This is just the start of the bigger and more serious things to write about concerning our chiefs and Ghanaians? infatuation with higher education qualifications. Higher qualifications are good, I must admit. But when it comes to choosing a chief, the qualities I shall personally seek in them are honesty, dedication to duty, dynamism, respectability, selflessness, competence, farsightedness and readiness to work hand in hand with their subjects. Crooks with intention to live ostentatiously at the expense of their subjects, bullying and treating them like dirt on their sandals, having no respect for their human rights, should not be made chiefs regardless of their formal higher
education qualifications.

I shall be back, sterner than today?s.

Rockson Adofo

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