Representation vs Leadership
The lack of clear leadership at the ongoing EndSARS protest is a feature, not a bug. However, it's time to have representation.
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a moulder of consensus - Martin Luther King, Jr
If there’s one thing Gen Z and Millenials can agree on, it’s that we hate the traditional concept of leadership. Leadership, for the most part, implies controlling and imposing your vision on followers.
The control that leaders often impose on their followers is what makes leadership revulsive to many of us. The ENDSARS protests have been evidence of that.
One of the many things protesting youths have reiterated is that there are no leaders among us. All of us are equal opportunity leaders and followers. Everyone is important.
For me, the lack of clear leadership at the ongoing protest is a feature, not a bug. Decentralization has been a tech buzzword for a minute now, especially in crypto-circles. In simple terms, it means the dispersal of power from a central system to a localized system.
Imagine thousands of people turning up independently at different locations, organizing themselves on the spot, and making their voices heard on the same topic. Yes, that’s decentralization.
Similar to blockchain technology, the decentralization of the protests means they are difficult to hack. The central nature of traditional leadership means that it creates a single point of failure. An error in judgement at the top will have dire effects on the entire system.
Decentralization solves those problems. As we’ve seen from the protests, even when prominent elements go astray, they are quickly excised or corrected, depending on the gravity of their error. The system is stronger and better as a result.
However, while central leadership has been discarded, we must look to get representation. As a student of human psychology, especially group psychology, I understand the importance of representation.
Numbers are good for making a statement and making demands, but they’re of no use for presenting those demands. Having representation doesn’t mean we lose our voice. It means we distil our desires into coherent points and choose (elect?) representatives to present those points before the people that have the power to effect the change we desire.
I can’t stress this enough, whatever representatives speak for us must be chosen among us.
Leadership was supposed to be about representation, but now it is about self-aggrandization and enrichment. Democracy is designed to be leadership decided by the people; leadership based on representation. That’s why it has caught on in the last 100 years as the most popular kind of leadership.
We know democracy has failed at the central level, but I believe we can take it back. We can appoint representatives that can speak for us in the corridors of change. We can create systems that hold these representatives accountable.
We can, and we must.
The representatives will not be the faces of our struggle; they will be the voices. Voices that can easily be replaced if they outlive their use or deviate from being on the side of the people.
Sorry Martin Luther, today’s leaders must search for, and follow consensus. In this generation, we’re equal leaders, equal followers.