Joseph Kabila is pictured above. You can read The New York Times' article from which I obtained the picture by clicking the following link: "Congo's Leader For 18 Years Is Now A Fugitive." That, by the way, is the headline found on the hardcopy version of the article. When you click the link, the headline will be a bit different, but the story is the same.
Kabila was the fourth president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, serving from 2001 to 2019. He took office ten days after the assassination of his father, President Laurent-Désiré Kabila. He is now in hiding, and facing the death penalty. Kabila calls the charges against him "sheer stupidity."
Here's a piece of "good advice" I obtained from reading about Kabila in The Times (emphasis added):
As crickets struck up and glassy Lake Kivu disappeared into the night, [Kabila] said his main failure as president was not transforming the Congolese into “better citizens.” Then, he said, “you get better leaders.”
Query whether a president can "transform" a nation's citizens into "better citizens" by anything that the president does (though George Washington's decision to leave the presidency after two terms in office, rather than seeking out continued control over the government, did, arguably, help teach citizens of the United States of America that it was they, not the president, who are the most important players in our system of self-government). Kabila, incidentally, appears not to have known about what George Washington did, and Kabila apparently held on to his presidency even after the end of the term for which he was elected.
Here is my comment on the quotation set out above. While I don't agree that a "president" can, generally, and by his own, personal action, "transform" citizens into "better citizens," I absolutely do agree that "better citizens" will result in "better leaders."
If that's true - and I do think it is - then what can we say about ourselves, as citizens, given who is now leading our country, after having been elected two times?
I think it's fair to say that if we were all "better citizens" we would have a different (and different kind of) president, and that any such president would be a "better leader" than the leader we actually have. If we did have such a "better leader," I am convinced that the nation (and the world) would be immeasurably better off. As I have noted in a previous posting, I think it's clear that we made a mistake in electing our current president.
What does it take to be a "better citizen"? Well, in my book, "better citizens" are those who are, personally and directly, engaged in "self-government" by being actively and personally involved in the politics that determines what our governments (at every level) actually do.
Voting? That's good (and note that our current president is trying to truncate or extinguish our ability to do even that). However, "voting" is not the main job of a citizen. That's a de minimus definition. "Better citizens" get involved - along with some friends and others who share their views and concerns - and try, with those friends and associates, to make the government do what they think would be good, and that would be the "right thing." That is what "self-government" requires - your personal work and involvement on issues related to our government. If you don't like what your Congress Member is doing about Palestine, for instance, get together a group of friends and figure out what you think the best strategy would be to force that Congress Member to change. Impossible? Actually, not! But it does take a lot of work. That's the work of "self-government."
The result, just like former president Kabila says, is "better leaders."
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