Governmental Leadership during the Pandemic- alacrity and Absence of it

Kesavan Sivanandam, Group Head- Global Airports, Ground Operations, AirAsia

Kesavan Sivanandam, Group Head- Global Airports, Ground Operations, AirAsia

While it is obviously not required to well much in describing the unequalled watershed moments that the maladies of Covid-19 have indeed cast traumatically on Humanity and its journey forward, we indeed have to marvel at the Human’s sheer dexterity, radical adaptability to a blatantly changed demography and survival techniques without which his apparent emerging from a plausible catastrophic situation, would have been a serious doubt! The role of Governments and Global bodies in trying to scramble around and come up to speed also cannot be brushed aside for without such a monumentally coordinated exercise, within every country, Citizens could not have been able to lift themselves up, for the wants and quantums were of unparalleled nature.

Well, almost! This serious event of Covid-19 also highlights threadbare, how fragile and feeble the World balance is and just what needs, in a matter of few weeks, to completely unsettle it and even topple it, hands thrown up and miserably. This also showed us through the prism how disconcerted Super Powers or any Nation, mostly, could be.

A simple arithmetic...if most of the World’s Vaccine production and logistics capabilities were holistically mobilised together, it would have taken just 320 days starting from December 2020 to have the whole World fully vaccinated. Now we are almost exactly 320 days farther and we are just about 25 per cent of the World Population fully vaccinated, with several countries still tottering and gasping for supplies and help.

A World that believes in equality but not equity; it was palpably visible that the Global Political Leadership was scampering around fending for themselves (just their own countries) rather than engaging in a progressive collaboration to mobilise the stakeholders, garner political and regulatory concurrence and unleash the combined potential, power and prowess of the Global community.

While it's absolutely acceptable and expected that the Heads of States for each country has to first take care of the immediate needs in their own Nations, the inability to realise that the World is an extended community not just in the eyes of an ethical pursuit but also, alas, in the eyes of the Pathogen. A thought of clairvoyance in realising that controlling a country/countries alone would be monumentally short of the requirement but an expeditious and equitable handling of the situation, in terms of the spread and quantum of the Vaccines and connected paraphernalia, was grossly as well as agonisingly missing. Time to realise that as a Global community, we are regretfully short of that preeminent Leadership requirement, that sees and acts as Humanity rather than a curtailed herd of peoples living in political boundaries.

Time to realise that as a Global community, we are regretfully short of that preeminent Leadership requirement, that sees and acts as Humanity rather than a curtailed herd of peoples living in political boundaries

Another similar example, though in a different gravity, is while the World was involved in local battles with the Virus, the World Travel Bodies or the World Leadership failed to moot things to get ready when eventually things would have eased off. A glaring example is that even after 19 months of the beginning of Pandemic and 14 months after the advent of the Vaccines, still there is no standardised parameters or mutually accepted norms between the countries to recognise the digital or physical documents of the Covid-19 in terms of Vaccination Certificates and/or the Test results. Individual countries follow their own best conceived standards and when the passengers travel from one country to another, they go through traumatic and prolonged methods to prove that they have indeed been vaccinated or tested. No industry driven common QR code standards or Country acceptable seamless sharing of API or other data links to recognise a genuinely vaccinated individual. The fact that travel started to rebound more than 15 months back and still does not have standardised parameters or/and mutually shared information, shows the hollowness of a certain aspect of the World Leadership community. And travel is just one of the many line items that would matter….

To many of us, it showed through the Political Leadership, especially in self-proclaimed Super-Powers and others, and left us gasping as to how incomplete our so-called circle of completeness is. While we are all thankful and are gratefully cognisant of what the Governments did for us in our own Countries, we are also woefully made aware of what it is, is what it is, when it comes to collective and collaborative approaches!