AN UNLIKELY LEADER

The ‘most powerful woman in the world’ might not, to the average lady, be the most sought after description to carry through life.

The adjective ‘powerful’ once projected an image of a heavy and muscle-bound female ready to crush any man who got cheeky. But today that adjective generally refers to mind and status. And the lady who has attracted that premier global accolade is none other than Angela Merkel, the outgoing Chancellor of Germany, the most prosperous country in Europe. Being the wealthiest nation in an entire continent is not necessarily something to evoke admiration. It might be sitting on vast oil reserves and letting foreigners do all the work. Not so with Germany, a country that, in 1989, at the collapse of the Berlin Wall, absorbed an economically decrepit country next door and all accompanying challenges.

The two countries had been West and East Germany, the former the leading economy in Europe, and the latter a devious and dysfunctional country controlled by a decaying Soviet regime. To give an idea of how dilapidated it was, when a West German chemical company took over an East German operation it found 200 people in one room, copying invoices and other company documents by hand! Not for a lack of photocopying equipment or carbon paper; but to keep people employed instead of rebellious. It must have been exactly like an efficient and prosperous company having to absorb another, equal in size but utterly unprofitable and insolvent. West Germany not only survived that but, as the new, united Germany, it also returned to its former economic pre-eminence; what an achievement.

Communist countries in that region weren’t too happy with German’s success. Russian leader Vladimir Putin, he of the much publicised photos of himself horse-riding minus his shirt, was aware that Merkel had once been badly attacked by a dog that she was now terrified of the canines. So he came to a press conference leading his pet Labrador to sit next to her. That’s bullying, though perhaps done in memory of his former master, the Soviet Union, a country that would have been unhappy to note that Merkel had grown up in East Germany and then became the most prominent female politician in the western world; and head of an economy far more efficient than that of Russia. Merkel trembled at the dog and laughed at Putin.

History

If you think I am too pro-German, let me tell you that as a tiny baby I heard German bombs dropping near my home in England. I did protest but my family put it down to hunger or diaper rash. And the Germans master-minded the most terrible holocaust in recent history, but those were not the Germans of today. If the people of this world have one marvellous attribute in common it is that, in time, most of them forgive the mistakes of others. Sadly of course, there are some who don’t. Merkel led Germany for 15 years, a record in that country’s history. Two episodes stand out. The first was the Eurozone monetary crisis, triggered mainly by EU’s Greece; a country where the rich spent their time happily evading taxation, and the government wasted its resources. That’s a common cry in the world today. Merkel led her country’s prominent role of support and resolution in that crisis. And then between 2015 and 2017, in the middle of the refugee crisis created by the dysfunctionality of most Middle-East countries, Germany, under Merkel, opened its doors and took in five times more refugees than any other country.

Praise

Merkel wasn’t popular with everyone at home for doing that, but she attracted unequivocal praise elsewhere, especially from then US President Barack Obama. It was seen globally as Germany paying penance for its appalling behaviour in World War II; nothing wrong with trying to heal the wounds. But Merkel quite rightly pointed out later that opening the doors was only part of the gesture. To counter the arguments that Germany, and other countries, were importing potentially hostile cultures and religions, she emphasised the need for better integration programmes, ensuring immigrants were properly assimilated into society; something many countries had failed to do over the previous decades. We, in Eswatini, should be determined to make sure of a proper integration of immigrants into our society. I don’t see it, yet. I’ve only witnessed a degree of xenophobia and that’s going in precisely the opposite direction. ‘It takes two to tango’, but let’s see an effective strategy in place. A careful and unspectacular operator, Merkel does appear to have one special attribute; she remained honest during her leadership. She didn’t raid the national coffers for her own benefit.  For a leader that is especially important; but rare.

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