On Founding Leaders of Nations

By Henry Srebrnik, Charlottetown Guardian

A newly independent country is often quite fragile. Its political culture has not yet solidified, and hence its first leaders can have great influence in setting its future course, domestically and in foreign affairs. They frequently establish a sense of national identity and purpose. This can involve shaping the narrative of the country’s history, promoting shared values, and fostering a sense of belonging among the population.

They often need to build the basic infrastructure of a country, including legal systems, economic structures, and administrative frameworks. These foundations are crucial for the long-term stability and growth of the nation.

A number of states have been lucky that way, especially when it came to charting a democratic path. Think of Errol Barrow of Barbados, Jawaharlal Nehru in India, David Ben-Gurion in Israel, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam in Mauritius, Nelson Mandela in post-apartheid South Africa, and even, in the more distant past, George Washington in the United States.

The followers of political philosopher Leo Strauss espouse “American exceptionalism” and mythologize the American republic’s founders as virtual demi-gods who created a uniquely free nation based on democratic ideals and personal liberty. Yet even in the United States, democracy has been under great pressure at times.

Other places have been less fortunate. In South Asia. Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, gained its sovereignty from Great Britain in 1948, with D. S. Senanayake as its first prime minister. Senanayake’s government introduced a citizenship act that immediately discriminated against the minority Tamils. (The Sinhalese are the majority in the country.)

Only about 5,000 Indian Tamils qualified for citizenship. More than 700,000 people, about eleven per cent of the population, were denied citizenship. Ever since, this ethnic issue has led to violent upheavals and ruinous civil wars, with tens of thousands of people dead.

Haiti, the second state in the Western Hemisphere to rid itself of colonial rule, was born in a revolution against French control. The revolt began in 1791 and ended in 1804 with independence. Its two leaders were Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, but the latter proclaimed himself an emperor two years later. The country has rarely had functioning elected governments since.   

The Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, was the first British colony in sub-Saharan Africa to acquire independence, with great fanfare. The leader of the nationalist movement, Kwame Nkrumah, became its first prime minister, and later, president. Under Nkrumah, Ghana played a leading role in international relations and the pan-Africanist movement.

But Nkrumah imposed a dictatorship in the 1960s, as he repressed political opposition. In 1964, he made Ghana a one-party state, with himself as president for life. He was overthrown in a coup two years later, and Ghana has since then alternated between democratic institutions and authoritarian ones.

Many other African countries have followed the same trajectory. The most recent case is South Sudan, which seceded from Sudan in 2011 following a decades-long civil war between its Arabic Muslim ruled north and Christian south. The newly sovereign state devolved into ethnic violence between the Dinka, under President Salva Kiir, and the Nuer, led by First Vice-President Riek Machar. Between 2013 and 2018, fighting forced a third of the country’s population from their homes and killed almost 400,000.

One of the most unfortunate cases has been Pakistan, formed in 1947 following the violent partition of British India into Hindu and Muslim majority countries, which displaced between 12 and 20 million people along religious lines. While Nehru governed India until his death in 1964, Pakistan’s political founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, died in 1948, just a year after independence.

Had Jinnah lived a few years longer, he may have been able to focus on building a successful democratic state, the way his contemporaries in India did. Instead, Pakistan’s leaders after Jinnah made fateful and destructive decisions that plunged the state into autocracy and reverberate to this day. In 1949, Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly passed the Objectives Resolution, which laid the groundwork for it to become an Islamic state, which it did in 1956.

Non-Muslim members of the assembly vigorously opposed it, and all of them voted against it, recalling that Jinnah had unequivocally said that Pakistan would be a secular state, not a theocracy. In 1958, the army’s chief of staff, Ayub Khan, orchestrated a military coup. There would many more. Pakistan’s military and intelligence services are today more powerful than ever.