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A good leader must be acceptable- Don
2006-01-15 07:57:01
By Correspondent Timothy Kahoho
An academician of the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Prof. Samwel Mushi, has stated that a good leader must have legitimacy of leadership within the community.
Professor Mushi said this when presenting his paper yesterday on the training workshop for Student Leaders of Higher Education at the Dar es Salaam Conference Centre (DCC).
He said a leader must have legitimacy-that is, he must be acceptable to his followers as a rightful leader.
The senior lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences of UDSM said that leadership can either be formal or informal provided the ones holding such positions have personal capacity to influence other people in the community.
’’Formal leaders are those who occupy official positions through tradition, election or appointment by a legitimate authority,’’ he defined, he added that informal leaders are those not holding official positions but they influence through their charisma or superior knowledge.
Mushi stipulated that there are six main bases for legitimacy of leadership, which he mentioned as might, tradition, charisma, election, appointment by legitimate authority and knowledge.
He said that any leader lacking these basic qualities of leadership is regarded as either a bad leader or dictator.
Another lecturer who presented his paper was Prof. Casmir M. Rubagumya, who contributed on the students for cost-sharing in African Higher Education as a result of the World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) induced structrual adjustment policies in the 1980s.
’’The rationale for cost-sharing is that higher education is costly but caters for very few people, especially the elite African countries,’’ observed Professor Rubagumya.
He said in Tanzania, cost-sharing for students in higher learning institutions was established by the Higher Education Students loans Act of 2004 but was dogged by problems even before it became operational.
’’In South Africa every institution has a loan office to cater for the students while here there are only three officers to process over 30,000 loan forms,’’ argued Rubagumya.
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