By Owei Lakemfa
The world this Monday marked the 2021 International Women’s Day with the traditional elite emphasis on women getting more leadership positions and not necessarily what they do in power or with power. A case which deserves attention is Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili who transformed from being the French Ambassador in Georgia to President of her host country.
She came from a big, rich country to manage the affairs of a small troubled state. Where France is a super power with nuclear weapons, a landmass of 643,801 square kilometres and a population of 67.06 million, her new country with a 69,700-square-kilometre territory and a tiny population of 3.716 million, cannot militarily defend itself.
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However, her Presidency tells a story of fate, the strength to tell the electorate the truth even where it conflicts with what they strongly believe and the common sense neither to rely on calculating allies nor act like the drunken monkey which believes it can take on the lion.
She was born French in 1952 by parents who in the 1920s migrated from Georgia. After graduating from the Institute of Political studies, Paris, she did a 1972 post graduate at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs, New York, United States and joined the French Foreign Ministry. After serving in countries like Italy, the United States and Chad and with French Missions in the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, and the European Union, she was, in 2003, appointed ambassador to Georgia.
Zurabishvili arrived Tbilisi when Georgia was boiling. It was one of the 15 countries that emerged from the 1991 disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR. After independence, it was led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia who was overthrown in a 1992 violent coup. This led to the emergence as President, of the last Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, who had the distinction of helping to reunite East and…
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