50
COVER STORY
Leadership As A
Differentiator
"The responses that we have witnessed
to this crisis have been by
and large a display of gross mismanagement
and politicization
of the issues in most cases by
leaders who seemed to have little
understanding of social responsibility,
medicine or economics."
MAL36/20 ISSUE
By Marketing Africa Crew
"We have learnt that leadership
without conscience and humanity
is actually tyranny. It cannot
ever be that the priority of
a leader is to run a country at
the expense of lives. Ironically
those who protected lives first
have faster return to business as
usual scenarios."
The world is in a turmoil as it is
being ravaged by a pandemic
caused by a novel corona virus
which in layman language just means
that the health fraternity are dealing with
a virus they are not familiar with hence
there is no known cure against it.
Why this is also a medical crisis is because
this new virus is highly contagious and
deadly as many of the people who are
spreading it are asymptomatic for a period
of time up to three weeks and therefore can
spread the disease without succumbing to
it themselves.
To make the matter more confusing is the
fact that the symptoms of the disease and
exactly how it spreads are so varied making
it especially difficult to spot and deal with
and to determine which approach will
help identify the virus and contain it.
The big debate at the moment is whether
the world has overreacted to the virus but
to answer that we need to look a bit into
history and try to put this pandemic into
perspective to use the famous dictum that
you use the known to find the unknown.
In modern times the last pandemic to
hit the world happened right at the end
of the First World War and it was called
the Spanish flu although its origin is still
disputed and it lasted for a period of two
years from 1918 to 1920.
Researchers are not in agreement whether
the fact that the flu occurred straight
after the First World War was what made
it particularly virulent and people were
already suffering from the devastation of a
world war and were then more vulnerable.
The confirmed cases in the Spanish flu
outbreak were estimated to have been over
500 million and it has been approximated
that up to 50 million people died of it in
the world. In the United States the flu
killed around 700 thousand.
The irony of the situation is that the flu
was more deadly than the First World
War itself, and coming at the tail end of
the war caused huge disruption on a world
reeling from the effects of a world war
and delayed the necessary reconstruction
effort.
In an effort to survive, countries around
the world experimented with ways to
contain the flu and their efforts are quite
well documented on what worked and
what did not. In an uncoordinated and
haphazard manner the world took two
years to vanquish the flu.
There have been other flu pandemics since
the 1918 one but none has been as deadly
as that one. There was one from 1957 to
1958 that killed approximately 2 million
people worldwide of which around 70
thousand were Americans.
Another one occurred from 1968 to 1969
which killed around 1 million people
including 34 thousand Americans and the
swine flu from 2009 to 2010 which had
500 thousand confirmed cases and a total
of 12 thousand Americans perished.
We need to note that flu seasons around
the world are common and individual
countries have departments that deal
with contagious diseases and there are
protocols and procedures that are in place
to mitigate flu epidemics.
What makes a particular flu epidemic
a pandemic is when it crosses national
borders. So the corona virus may be novel
but certainly not unique and it begs the
question why does it seem to have been
mishandled as if the world has never dealt
with a flu outbreak previously?
To answer that question we need first
to appreciate that we currently live in a
globalized economy and that measures
taken to contain the medical crisis by any
country have far reaching economic and
financial impact on other countries.
The expected economic devastation across
the world is tremendous and estimates
show that the corona virus crisis will end
up causing a recession and the cost to the
world will be to the tune of between six
and twenty trillion dollars.
This is as a result of the effects of
lockdowns, jobs loses, businesses closing,
supply lines disrupted, food production
and transportation crippled and the health
sector in disarray. The economic impact is
real and is also immediate.
We have created a world that if the
world GDP does not grow by at least
two percentage points per year then the
world goes into a recession and the world
economy was already fragile waiting for
the bottom to fall out even before the
corona virus crisis.
In the past, disasters have been localized
in particular areas and usually developed
countries help each other pull out of
the disaster. But this is the first time in
recent history that all the countries in
the developed world are facing the same
problem simultaneously.
The developing countries that have
traditionally depended on the first world
to assist them to cope with these types
of disasters were caught in most cases
flat footed as they usually wait to follow
the lead of their traditional international
supporters.
It is this scenario that faced the countries
of the world and it boiled down to the
country leadership on how to try to
balance the real medical danger that was
being faced and to reduce and mitigate the
economic impact of their decisions.
The responses that we have witnessed
to this crisis have been by and large a
display of gross mismanagement and
politicization of the issues in most cases
by leaders who seemed to have little
understanding of social responsibility,
medicine or economics.
We have always assumed that human
life was sacrosanct but this is one time
it appears the dictates of commerce were
more important than saving human lives
and when this crisis is over we shall have
We seem to have a lot of managers running
political parties and by default
governments but we don’t seem to have
leaders leading people to a better life
hence the obsession with business statistics
rather than social statistics. No one
is trying to make the world great.