Guinean leadership in the face of crisis, from Ebola to COVID-19

Abstract

This paper, based on research undertaken during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, evaluates Guinea’s leadership infrastructure from independence in 1958 until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It determines that Guinea’s leadership can be characterized by a coercive social contract. The paper uses leadership theory to determine the underlying issue to Guinea’s continuous stagnant development. It highlights that leadership emergence is deficient due to the inability of persons and institutions to respond to the true causes of Guinean’s malaise, thus demonstrating an inability to build mutuality between the population and national leaders. The failure, then, to build true mutuality with the population and advance common goals led to a perpetuation of the coercive social contract, which historically has proven unsustainable and has resulted in the swift and violent departures of successive regimes. The paper specifically focused on leadership in response to crisis, during the 2013 Ebola and 2019 Covid-19 pandemic to demonstrate that whilst crisis response did take place, leadership was lacking and thus a continued cycle of re-enforcement of the status quo at the detriment of the needs of the population was maintained.