The effectiveness of a country's leaders is best measured by examining the well-being of that country's citizens.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position

The statement linking the effectiveness of a country's leadership with the well-being of the citizens, places emphasis on welfare of the citizens as the main objectives of governance in a country. Different leaders assume authority at different times. In a democratic system, these leaders are voted in to power by the citizens. They give the leaders their mandate to govern them with one thing in mind, which is, that their welfare be sustained and improved upon. These leaders make series of campaign promises, centered on policies and projects that will improve the life of the citizens of the state. To understand the link between leadership and the well-being of the citizens of a nation, one would ask, what is the true meaning of leadership?

Leadership can be seen as the process of overseeing the affairs of an institution. The sole essence of leadership is to improve the state of the institution it leads. Take a country as an institution, several things can be improved upon - electricity, road network, communication system, water supply, etc. - all have direct impact on the well-being of the citizenry. When leaders make policies, these policies have direct effect on the masses and affect the life they leave directly or indirectly. Some policies and projects initiated by the leadership of a country can be short-term or long-term, and how they affect the life of the citizens vary as well.

For long term projects, it might take a while sometimes when the leadership has vacated office before the impact on the society can be felt. An example is the global system of mobile telecommunication project instituted by Abacha regime in Nigeria. The project materialized about five years after Abacha's government and it took another three years for the price of the telecommunication market to drop. Today it is so cheap that everybody can afford it. Because it has improved the life of the citizens, one would not use its direct impact today to judge the immediate government, although it can be argued that they have made series of policies to support the continued development and growth of the global system of mobile telecommunication project, much like the governments that have come before it.

For short-term projects, the impact on the society is felt almost immediately or within a short-term period. For such projects it would be easy to measure the standard of leadership offered with the immediate impact on the life of the citizens. Consider a road construction project which takes six months period to be completed, its impact on the life of the citizens can be measured immediately. Questions like how are the citizens using this new road? Has it relieved them of the trauma of having to pass through longer routes and areas with traffic jam? Does the citizens appreciate the road or would they have preferred another road instead of the one given? These and many more questions would help to deduce the direct impact of this new road on the well-being of the citizens.

However, not all short-term projects or policies can yield almost immediate result that could be used to measure the the effectiveness of a leadership. Consider an education project that took two years to complete the building of a university. It will certainly take another four to five years for the university to graduate students, and then the students will have to seek employment, before the effects of the project can be felt on the life of the citizens. In such a situation, how would you measure the leadership that instituted the project?

Finally, while the effectiveness of the leadership of a country can be measured by the well-being of the citizens, we must consider the policies and projects instituted by such leaders and how long it will take to reach maturity. Also some governments inherit the errors made by past leaders. Should we judge their leadership based on the situation they inherited? Unless we are able to provide answers to these and a couple other questions, it will be difficult to measure the effectiveness of a leadershipwith the well-being of the citizens.