Jacinda Ardern: Is She The Greatest Leader The World Has Ever Seen?

Adebayo Adeniran
4 min readJan 19, 2023

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Jacinda Ardern via Wikimedia Commons

The news came in only hours ago that the New Zealand Prime Minister —Jacinda Ardern — would be stepping down from the position which she has held for more than five years.

When she burst onto the scene back in 2017, she made headlines for not only being the youngest prime minister of this antipodean nation, but also due to the fact that she had a child in office.

You must understand that people in this part of the world pay very little attention to what goes in New Zealand; if you were to ask me to name its previous prime ministers, I would seriously struggle.

While I may be able to name previous Australian Premiers such as Bob Hawke, Malcolm Fraser (who paid a personal visit to my grandfather ), Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, but I have never been able to do the same with its closest neighbour.

And that says everything about Ms. Ardern.

When the Christ church killings took place in 2018, we saw a leader who took it upon herself to bring people together. Her compassion, courage and language stood in stark contrast to the sort of rhetoric that we have grown accustomed to on this side of the Atlantic from our racist and Islamophobic leaders.

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Adebayo Adeniran

A lifelong bibliophile, who seeks to unleash his energy on as many subjects as possible