Leadership Ingredients of President Nimeri (1969-1985)

Abstract

Leadership Ingredients of President Nimeri (1969-1985) Elsalamabi, Abdel Rahman, B.Sc. University of Houston, 1986. L.L.B., El Neelain University 2001. MPA U of K 2003, MSc Aberdeen 2006. Dissertation Directed by Professor Hassan Ali ElSaouri. This research examines the application of various leadership ingredients theories together with their arguments and justifications put forward for the studying of President Nimeri’s administrative, behavioural and political leadership styles. The administrative leadership styles were classified into two major segments depending on the nature of the challenging situations including coups and/or up-rests surrounding the President at one or more time during his 16-year presidency tenures in office. President Nimeri reacted to minor situation for about 30 attempted coups, 16 strikes and 24 student protesting demonstrations with the administrative style of a fire-fighter. Furthennore, the President had dealt with the two major attempted coups of 1971 and 1976 invasion (Murtazaga) with a different approach where he adapted participative leadership style, which was considered by many scholars as a panacea for productivities and or services increase in private as Well as in public organizations the research fiirther assessed the political leadership behaviour in light of the international relations theories where the major political behaviour of a certain superpower categories into three major themes of realist -a solid believer of utilization of power including military, economics, etc. — liberalist who merit the democratic principles; and ideologist who build his virtue on acceptable values and beliefs. Nimeri’s leadership assessed as realist in some of his terms, he then adapted some principles of the liberalist, later he switched to adapt the idealist virtue. The research methodology for major part of this research was rather descriptive and depends mainly on secondary data gathered from many scattered writings on President Nimeri by himself and/or by writers like Dr. Mansour Khalid, and Dr. Faysal Abdallah, Prof. Elsaouri plus others. The second part of this research was also descriptive and referring to the writings of many scholars like Freud, Lasswell, George Alexander, Bamer-Berry and Rosenwein to name a few. One findings of this study showed that President Nimeri was vulnerable in changing his administrative leadership style; he evolved toward participative leader who strived to increase political participation and decrease his presidential power whenever he was threatened by a major military coup or a military invasion. On the other hand, Nimeri’s administrative leadership style was characterised by “Fire-Fighter” approach whenever he faced minor or trivial challenge to his regime survival. Nimeri’s mechanism applied when changing his administrative leadership style to reflect great elements of the participative leadership style- whenever he managed to counter-attack any threatening situations (like military coup or invasion) - via either implementing major changes to the organizational settings for the decision-making process, or sharing more key positions with his subordinates and/or political elites. Another finding pertaining to his administrative behaviour style showed that Nimeri had at least three inner-conflicts, which extemalized in the opposite directions. The first one was extemalized in glorifying his family and enriching unjustly his brother. A second conflict was extemalized by presenting himself as an intellectual or rather philosophical writer, who thoughtfully wrote at least two books, and even Great Islamic Imam (clergy) who breached everything about Islam. The last conflict was extemalized by showing excessive machismo; and also by portraying an image of surrounding himself with important women. In regard to the shifting ideology Nimeri could be assessed as a narcissist and to that end his obvious exaggerations would support further such a narcissism behavior. His high Emotional Intelligence was assessed.