When you preside over a powerful country for a long period with tentacles reaching all over the world, then that experience needs to be shared. Former UK, Prime Minister, Tony Blair has just released a book on leadership. The political activist and academic may not be like a former world leader, but that does not mean we cannot appreciate what the world figure has to say, a book on leadership that provides valuable advice for those still in power.
As an academic who studies world politics, I would say Mr. Blair would never make my list of leaders I admire, but having said that I believe Mr. Blair’s 2024 publication on leadership contains priceless offering that no current leader should ignore.
As a public intellectual in Guyana, with a bias for the leadership of President Ali, I would recommend Dr. Ali reads Mr. Blair’s manuscript because it offers guidelines that are useful. Mr. Blair’s book comes at a time when the President is under focus, particularly by the Stabroek News and civil society activists, for his inclination to reply to critics of his government.

In fact, Dr. Bertrand Ramcharran, sees that inclination as a step in autocratic direction. Mr. Blair’s volume addresses that process frontally, and, for this reason, among others, it would be wise for Dr. Ali to read Blair. I am still nonplussed as to why any human would chastise a prime minister or president for replying to his/her critics especially when the condemnations are based on emotional vitriol, fictions, deliberate distortions, and incredible nonsense.

I offer one example before I return to Blair. How can any Guyanese knowing the state of our economy as a poor, post-colonial nation, the levels of poverty we inherited from colonial hegemony, the low level of development, the low levels in manufacturing and industrialisation that we inherited from the colonial era, tell the government that Guyana should immediately cease oil production because Guyana must save the world’s climate?

Such an incredible foolishness will invoke the wrath of any prime minister or president who is being looked at by the entire nation to provide policies that would take his/her country into modernisation. Mr. Blair focuses on this type of leadership in his book. He is pellucid that a leader has to address his critics and must never walk in the direction where the onlookers think he is a weak leader who can be bullied.

I quote what he told an interviewer on his book: “What I’m really saying is, if you’re not careful, you can become completely psychologically derailed by criticism, and you can’t allow that to happen.” So if the leader does not reply to criticism, where does that leave his leadership? In that same interview, Blair used these words: “I can’t think of a country that’s undergone a significant process of change that hasn’t had a strong leadership from the centre driving it.”
Remember the Stabroek News editorial from the Saturday Man who noted that Dr. Ali’s customary meet-the-people visits are undermining the jurisdiction of local authorities. Juxtapose this with the quote above from Mr. Blair. Simply put, a leader must lead and he must confront the incredible nonsense that is written against his administration.

The part of his book that relates directly to President Ali is when he noted that as the leader settles down, hubris tends to open the door. One of the exceptional qualities of President Ali is that he is devoid of hubris. I have written it several times that President Ali is the only leader in our country’s history that has been successful in running Guyana not exclusively from his office but from the 83,000 square miles of Guyana.  Dr. Ali does not come across as a leader who is arrogant pompous and displays hubris. This quality, I believe, is going to work in Ali’s favour in the forthcoming general elections.
There is one aspect of the book I like because what Blair advocates for current leaders is something I knew and embraced when I was very, very young- get people to talk to you that are from outside your horizon because they tell you as they see it. An interesting thing has happened with the review of this book by the former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Surgeon. In her review of Blair, Sturgeon herself formulated an interesting conversation of leadership that makes for good reading. In fact, she fills some vacuums on Blair’s text. What happened then is, in reviewing Blair, Sturgeon has contributed valuable advice to current leaders around the world that is as good as Blair’s.