New Year’s wish for leaders

We are poised at the very threshold of another New Year, and as is the tradition we are all congratulating and wishing each other all the best for the next twelvemonth. Those who have never tired doing it, will be making vows to do this and to stop doing that.

Some of the wishes we send to each other are nothing more than pro-forma gimmicks that we have copied from somewhere and can reproduce and despatch without a thought.

It’s a fine culture that enables even mortal enemies to exchange civilities and, at least momentarily, bury the hatchet and, perchance, establish a tabula rasa, a clean slate, before embarking on a new cycle of bloody minded hostilities as the New Year unfolds. Make peace for one week in December, be civil for much of the first two weeks of January and February, but as you approach the Ides of March… once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

If we had not been socialised into these niceties that make us smile at people who have their daggers planted in our backs, we would end our departing year and embark on the new one with sincere wishes that even our most ardent haters would find sincere. Examples hereunder:

As we enter into this New Year, may all who have been good to their fellow men and women find it joyous, purposeful and fulfilling. Conversely, may all those who have been nasty to fellow humans find in it little joy or pleasure.

May all who have played a positive role in furthering and defending the worthy causes of human emancipation and the happiness, prosperity and happiness of the peoples of the world continue their good work in the New Year, because a good person’s work, just like a woman’s, is never done. May all who have sided with the enemies of humanity by supporting and furthering nefarious causes, spend the year ruing their waywardness.

May those who have struggled and achieved a measure of success in the past year have the humility to know that what they have gained is but little and not irreversible, and learn not to sit on their laurels for these can be pulled from under them. May those who struggled and failed have the courage to try again, and again, as nothing in life is permanent.

I wish all who hold the mirage of political power the wisdom to realise that it’s only a mirage and as such, deceptive, unreal. May they spend the coming two semesters reflecting on the illusion of power and the destruction it has visited on demigods like Saddam, Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi, and stop believing that these things only happen to Arab despots, not black ones. I wish them more eyes and ears on thinking heads than guts and intestines in gluttonous stomachs, so that they think and feel more than they grab and feed.

May the New Year restore us to basic rationality, which makes us laugh if we are tickled and wince if we are pinched, not the other way round; so that our dogs bark instead of crowing and our he-chickens crow instead of barking; so that our politicians do politics instead of thievery and our beloved thieves do thievery, not politics; so that consequently our politicians go to government house and our thieves go to jail; so that if your people are becoming poorer with every passing year you don’t make them celebrate their poverty.

This could be an auspicious year for those who believe that determination, hard work and smart investment beget more durable and sustainable results that are not tinged with the fear of being asked uncomfortable questions by a hungry populace; it should be an inauspicious one for those who believe that where you did not sow is where you must reap.

Finally, I want this year to make sense, so that we do the done thing, so that we do good even as we strive to do well; that the just are rewarded and the unjust are, well, made to think again.