HOW ARE STUDENTS WELL - POSITIONED TO EXERCISE COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP TO AGITATE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE? - a podcast by ALC Pan-African Radio

Transcript

To consider this question, it is sensible to first define collective leadership.
According to scholars, at the core of the concept of shared leadership, or collective leadership is the idea that instances of leadership can be attributed to the collective leading itself.
Some scholars define collective leadership as a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goal. Others define ‘public leadership’ as a form of collective leadership that improves life in communities through the effort of public, private, and voluntary individuals. The focal unit of analysis for this type of leadership is the group, organisation or collective and its engagement with external factors.
Within the collective, leadership does not sit in the hands of a single individual. This is despite the fact sometimes one person is seen as representing the collective, even if this person does not wield a monopoly over influence. This seems to be what President Mandela was referring to in the clip we heard earlier.
Collective leadership is not static. The ability of leadership to endure over time depends on the ability of the collective to remain connected by a mutual goal. Therefore, the emergence of new or unexpected challenges and the divergence of individual interests over time is a challenge to collective leadership.
Historically, student movements in particular, have been powerful vehicles for challenging the status quo in African countries and around the world. When I speak about students here, I am particularly referring to university students, although the recent global Youth Strike for Climate clearly demonstrates that even students in primary school and younger can demand more from leaders through collective action.
As a socio-political space, the university has a unique capacity to become the site of radical or revolutionary activism. Students exist as a distinct social group and their politics are a distinctive form of political action within the broader society. According to scholars, student movements exert influence through collective or distributive power. While the power dynamic that defines individual power is the power of A over B, collective or distributive power is the power of A and B together. Thus, the ability of individuals to cooperate and organize on university campuses is important for the strengthening of collective power.
The capacity of student movements to generate mutuality with broader socio-economic and usually working-class concerns is important for determining the scale of activism and its potential to challenge existing socio-political structures. Thus, student protests that grow into general protests tend to be closely tied with wider societal disaffection and industrial action in particular.
It has been argued that in post-colonial Africa, the privileged status that student have in society positioned them well for collective action. Students existed as a privileged group due to the relative weakness of other groups in civil society, a shared identity with political elites, societal perceptions about the status conferred by education and the scarcity of opportunities for tertiary education.
This has changed considerably in contemporary times. In many African countries, jobs for university graduates are few, youth unemployment rates high and the instrumental value and utility of tertiary education is increasingly questionable.
How then therefore do we measure the success of collective leadership that is exercised by a student movement? Success can be measured based on the ability of the student movement to gain traction, visibility and eventually form a protest. This requires the successful establishment of mutuality with the working class and other social groups.

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