Islamic SHS Students showed proactive leadership, while the government of Ghana only displayed failed leadership and had to take a face-saving reactive decision to fix a temporal speed ramp which in itself does not solve the problem.

Our country is suffering from a lack of proactive and result-oriented leadership. This deficiency leads to misplaced priorities being chased when the real problems that will bring relief to the people are left unattended. This if not checked now, can cause more problems for the nation in the future.

In 2018 alone, The West Africa Senior High School at Adenta had seen six of its students hit by vehicles on the Madina-Adenta highway in 2018 alone, before the government reacted following several demonstrations by the youth of the area. Over 190 people were reportedly knocked down on the stretch in 2018 alone.

This and what has transpired between the Ghana Police and the Islamic SHS students are clear demonstrations of reactive leadership, which are dangerous for organizations and nations like ours.

True leaders do not wait for avoidable casualties and mistakes to occur, for lives to be lost, and for wrong decisions to be taken by subordinates or ordinary people before they react.

Sadly, that is what we see today as a nation. We are never a step ahead of our problems, even when we know these problems are staring at us.

It took the boldness of the students to demonstrate the unprofessional conduct of the Ghana Police Service, to wake the government up and out of deep sleep and its unconcerned posture as far as the rampant accidents experienced at the school’s stretch of the road concerned.

The Islamic SHS students have shown us all that it takes more than just complaining about the failure of those in leadership to smoke them out to do what is right. If the students had not protested and the carelessness of the Ghana Polic had not been displayed, not even a sewing thread would have been used to control speeding vehicles plying the road.

Safety ropes have been placed as temporary speed humps on the road in front of the Islamic Senior High School at Abrepo in Kumasi.

They were put there a day after students of the high school protested to demand speed ramps to prevent knockdowns from speeding vehicles. However, just as temporal solutions do not solve near-permanent problems, permanent speed ramps need to be completed in record time now. Two weeks is enough to do that. Leadership must not go back into the comma and watch on until another pedestrian or student is knocked by vehicles on the said road.

The Deputy Minister of Education visited the school and called on the country can learn from the incident however, Ghana does not learn from the past because in 2018 as have been established a similar incident took place leading to WASS losing 6 students to road accidents and we never learned.

“We want to avoid the recurrence of a similar phenomenon on that same campus and to even avoid such similar incident from occurring in any of our over 846 SHS and TVET institutions across the country.” If this is the case, the first proactive leadership action that should engage the attention of the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service is to reach out to all the SHS and TVET institutions across the country to ascertain their challenges regarding such issues and then move in with experts to professionally access the dangers and offer practical solutions which should be implemented in record time. The MoE and GES must wake up now if not other schools with similar situations will be forced to use the Islamic SHS approach to get results.

Today our problems as a nation, as institutions, and as businesses are not the lack of resources or manpower but just the absence of true leadership. There are just too many unfit-for-purpose personalities parading as leaders and making things go wrong either without doing anything or doing something after allowing the mess to cause havoc.

READ: Islamic SHS incident: Dampare heads Kumasi over as police launches probe

Source: Wisdom Hammond – Leadership expert