The resignation announcement of New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is being spun by "experts" as a gender issue. The world is giddy with some of these. “See, women can’t have it all.” “There she goes putting marriage and child over job.” “Observe and update that list, put out that theory about women in positions of power and inevitable early burnout.” Or, “Tch, tch, she just couldn’t handle the misogyny.” If you manage to sidestep that discourse, there is a more pertinent point she has drawn attention to.

Akela

Towards the tail end of a long speech Ardern said to her constituency, “I hope… you can be your own kind of leader — one that knows when it’s time to go.” Temporality of leadership — now that’s something to think about, no? In The Jungle Book, Akela, the great grey Lone Wolf and leader of the Pack, is still in his prime when he starts to think of the time when his strength will ebb away and he will get “feebler and feebler, till at last he is killed by the wolves and a new leader comes up — to be killed in his turn”. One wonders if Akela’s creator, Rudyard Kipling, believed this of the Raj? Would he have imagined that the white man would give up his “burden” some day? Irony of ironies, in 1989, a US senator cited Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden in Parliament to argue that the US should retain control of the Philippines.

Tanks

Ardern said something about not being able to lead a country on anything less than a “full tank, plus, a bit in reserve”. Now that is a sentiment that would be difficult to fathom in many parts. Xi Jinping is to remain President for life. And as Zelensky puts it, the war in Ukraine is for “one person to remain in power until the end of his life”. Trump wants to run for President in 2024. Closer home, check that list of long, longer and longest-serving chief ministers, prime ministers and parliamentarians. Clearly, different tanks, differently powered. The ruling BJP decided to tweak party policy on poll tickets ahead of the 2019 general elections, to phase out some tanks. That they might have to do a U-turn on that one to accommodate special tanks in future is a possibility. But let that be, this is about Ardern. Give her some credit for having a sense of timing. Akela died a leader long after he had given up his position as Pack boss.