Time to make good leaders

I have heard many people tell stories of how they survived Supertyphoon “Yolanda.” A common thread in their narratives is the harrowing experiences unlike any they have gone through in their lives before. Not surprising. After all, Yolanda is the strongest typhoon in recorded history.

Another common thread is their criticism of the manner the national government and President Aquino himself responded to their desperate situation after Yolanda.

I don’t need to repeat here their plaints; most likely you have read about them in newspapers or the social media. What I want to call attention to is that for any nation to transcend a tragedy of catastrophic proportions, a good leader is indispensable. Take Italy, Germany and France after World War II. Read their histories and you will appreciate the great role their leaders had in rebuilding their nations, which were devastated by the war. The names are well known: Alcide de Gasperi of Italy, Konrad Adenauer of Germany and Charles de Gaulle of France. If we were to identify a common denominator among these three leaders, I would say it is this: They were wise. They had the wisdom to see what to aim for and the knowledge of how to get to the goal. And all three of them were strong. For their stories you can read Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times.”

It is not my intention to pass judgment on President Aquino. My main concern is how our nation has not been gifted with someone like De Gasperi, or Adenauer, or De Gaulle, or even  George Washington—men whose ideas and deeds have built a nation and continue to do so through generations.

Some say that we do not have in our culture a system to develop the leaders we need, much less a system to put them in positions of power. I do not want to talk about politics here because that is neither my expertise nor my intention. But my point here has something to do about justice which is a moral issue.

There should be a system we must develop so that we are able to elect leaders who are competent and can lead the nation especially through crisis situations which, to be sure, we will encounter from time to time. If we demand that a medicine, law, engineering or architecture graduate first pass a difficult board examination before he may be allowed to practice his profession (because any mistake on his part could bring harm to a patient or client), why don’t we demand that a person first pass an exacting test to qualify for the position of the president of the Philippines?

At present, government requires a candidate to pass the Career Executive Service Board exams before he qualifies for an executive position in government. Then why not demand the same of any aspirant for the country’s highest executive position? And there are far more reasons to demand competence from the president because his decisions can affect the lives of millions of Filipinos.

Good leaders are not born, they are made. We Filipinos must find a way of making them.

—FR. CECILIO L. MAGSINO,

cesmagsino@gmail.com