October 12, 2021
Before my readers curse me out, let me explain the title. Over the last two decades at least the pitch for female leadership has grown louder and louder, however is that need for sex equity and balance in leadership causing us to neglect the true qualities and ideals we want in leaders to begin with?
I think it can be safely said that you can have incompetent women as much as you can have incompetent men, same thing with corrupt men and women at all levels. The only thing different is the “naughty bits.”
But, have we taken a look at what happened in South Korea a few years ago when their first female president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached for corruption? Let’s try even close to home with former Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, who was also impeached and left office disgracefully?
I’m bringing this to my readers attention is because in the “Western World” and that includes the Caribbean and Central America in that breath, we have been searching feverishly for female leadership until it seems like an unnatural obsession, which may be misleading.
Take for example, no one wants to talk about Mia Mottley in Barbados in any negative light because she is the toast of the town now. Their great example, however there are glaring deficiencies in her leadership as well and if Barbadians were not as laid back as most Caribbean people are she would be getting the riot act read to her as I type.
She is not incompetent, of course not. She is just not how you build her up to be, this paragon of virtue as if she is not a human being. I see the same lacklustre politician as in any number of male leaders in the Caribbean and Central America. She has not performed up to what was expected of her on domestic reforms and no one in the “international community” cares to examine it beyond their shallow view of her being a female leader.
Not only has she not delivered a lot on domestic reforms, she has changed up her platform as soon as she won office. She went cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund, and a lot of the economic reforms she promised she has not mentioned since- as if they could have been done in the first instance.
I’m just saying let us use this example to not look at what gender the person is, but let us look at competence and integrity moving forward. No one deserves to get a free pass for whatever their lot is in life.