Responsible Governance: From Rising Unrest to Accountability and Transparency
It is both timely and necessary to reflect on the changes unfolding around us. Stability in political systems, economic structures, and even shared definitions of truth is being challenged in unprecedented ways. What once seemed secure is now questioned, and what once appeared permanent is proving fragile.
The unrest we see today is not extraordinary. History has always been marked by upheaval. What is different is that the exposure is immediate. Artificial intelligence, social platforms, and new tools of information make it impossible to conceal injustice or silence dissent. Truth is contested in real time, and the scrutiny of leaders is constant.
This brings with it a profound responsibility. Leaders cannot withdraw into neutrality. Citizens cannot excuse themselves from engagement. Governance, once thought of as distant and bureaucratic, must be understood as a living framework: accountability, responsibility, and transparency. These principles are not theoretical ideals. They are practical tools available to every stakeholder.
Protest and resistance shaped the revolutions of the past. Gandhi and Mandela stood against systems that denied them basic structures of representation. Today, in many parts of the world, governance structures are already in place. Yet the gap lies in how little we use them. Too often, people resort to disruption because they have not been shown how to leverage the tools they already hold.
The task before us is not to repeat old forms of resistance. It is to intelligently and ethically utilise the governance mechanisms available to us. Public accountability, corporate responsibility, academic governance, and political structures can all be leveraged to demand transparency and shape outcomes.
This awakening is being led by generations who understand their influence. By 2030, Generation Z will represent a quarter of the global population, holding extraordinary economic power. Surveys already show that they are drawn to impact-driven work and demand responsibility from the institutions they support. This is not a trend. It is a structural shift.
The challenge, then, is to ensure that leaders recognise governance not as a closed code, but as a public contract. Every citizen, every customer, every investor is a stakeholder with the right and duty to call for accountability. The strength of democracy, or of any governance system, rests on how effectively this responsibility is shared.
We cannot ignore humanitarian crises. We cannot reduce sustainability to climate metrics alone. Nor can we remain complicit in silence. To lead today means to name issues openly, to raise concerns intelligently, and to influence outcomes through ethical structures that exist for precisely this purpose.
Our responsibility is clear: to ensure that governance remains alive, relevant, and accountable, not only to institutions but to the people they are meant to serve.
Timecode:
00:00 Awakening and Stability Challenges
00:31 The Role of AI and Fact-Checking
00:50 Rising Leaders and Social Unrest
01:46 Sustainability and Humanitarian Issues
04:23 Leveraging Governance Structures
06:05 The Power of Transparency and Accountability
08:42 Generation Z: The Future of Influence
09:47 Conclusion: Ethical Influence and Responsibility
Transcript:
I think the, the, the issue now is, uh, as I alluded to earlier, we, we are, we are in a space where there's an awakening. There's an awakening of thinking where stability has now been threatened. Stability in our systems, uh, stability in what is true stability in definitions that we took for granted that is being challenged like never before. For us to be ethical, for leaders to arise now we need to be able to speak. And the AI today to be able to fact check us is immediate. Don't worry about leveraging on fact check. It's the responsibility of you to ask about everything you hear, and if that's true, and question it and develop from it, learn from it.
What we are, what we are facing today is that leaders are rising up that are also calling for destruction and and disruption. And in the meantime, we find as the systems change, there's turmoil and there's nothing unusual about this, what people and what we need to realize is there's. Seeing it visibly, and I'm not saying something new visibly, there is an unrest that's rising among people. It's impossible to ignore, uh, issues or to stay away from sensitive issues these days because in the next two years history about what has been happening in the last 10, the last two or the last 80 will never be the same. Um, and we need to be. Authentic to ourselves, genuine. And if we are, we need to talk about all issues of sustainability.
That means humanitarian crisis as well. This is staying away from politics. It is staying away from diplomatic contracts, engagements. It is talking about what we, you and I in life can do with the everyday things that we do to support the change that we want. To create the democracy and the leadership, uh, or the system that we want, which may not be democracy at this point, but what does that look like and how do we do that? The, the, the restlessness is arising because we find that, um, uh, they have been exposure, exposure to the stability, exposure to what is real and what defines what the. Recent action of the United Kingdom, uh, to have protestors who got arrested because they held cards that were proclaimed to be anti terrorists.
They have stood up for something different. This is a change. This is a change in something we haven't seen before. We are seniors, a hundred, uh, a hundred people over the age of 70 were arrested, challenging the norm. In the next round there would be 5,000 It. It is a new form of rising up and what is fantastic to see and to witness is that it's the seniors that are leading us, but it's time now that us, the youth, the middle age, that we also rise up now to say that humanitarian issues are unavoidable and must be discussed because it's only when we name something.
We can challenge it and then arrive at a solution. Until we do that, we are revealing, coordinated half truths and being complicit in diverting attentions. I think then we need to look at solutions on how and what we can do when people say we cannot control what's coming. I, I always argue that it's not the point of what's coming. It's our responsibility in influencing it through knowledge we can influence. We need our academics to rise up again. We need our students to express themselves, not disruptively, but my message today is to. To look at ways in which we can use our voices to speak intelligently through ethical means, through structures of governance that exist, that have been created for us.
We cannot use the same methods of, uh, raising our. Dissatisfaction to governments and authorities as they were done in the revolutions of the past as our great leaders, ma, ma, Gandhi or Mandela, fought through systems that were not in place using resistance and revolutions. We live the majority of us in communities and societies where we have built the structures. The governance structures that are in place that allow us to utilize it and now has come the time to utilize and leverage those structures. The issue with leveraging of governance structures is that many people don't understand what it's about and how much power they have with it, and they result, therefore, they resort to disruptive behavior, protesting, even if it's peaceful, protesting.
But through the modern way, just like how warfare has developed, raising your concern and dissatisfaction as a majority, which can be so easily collated today, through AI and through social media, we are able to peacefully raise our voices by concerns through stakeholders. Request for management to call on transparency.When it is needed to, uh, demand accountability when it is due and to expect responsibility. Those are three simple things. Accountability, responsibility, and transparency. These are not the. Two dimensional codes that are locked up at the back of government vaults or parliament chambers. They are the power for every one of us to utilize, to leverage off.
Every one of us in some way is a stakeholder. Because we live in society, the governance has various forms. It, it, it can, uh, it can take the form of academic governance or corporate governance, political governance, even diplomatic governance exists along all forms of governance. The spirit is the same. It's about. The lead is holding responsibility and accountability to the stakeholders. That's the majority of us. Whether you are a customer, a citizen, that that votes a, uh, a, a, a stakeholder, a major investor. You are in some form linked to various forms of governance and utilizing your voice to call for transparency then is not just within your right.
It's within your duty to do so. And it is within leadership to respond to that, to publicly account and bring transparency. And with that knowledge that we can now show to every stakeholder, every citizen, you would then realize that through decisions, through your behavior, through your thinking, you will be able to influence. Leaders who are currently not representing the democratic principles, who are causing the, the, the downfall of the faith in democracy, we. As individuals, as citizens responsible in the choices we make in calling for accountability in publicly attending dialogue because only through dialogue we can reach on consensus levels.
We can start on a basis because these principles are not fictitious. These principles are not the ideal world. These principles are built. They are. Adhered to. They are publicly accepted, they are signed on, they are reported on. But the failure or the gap to have this understanding is where the power is cut off and where we result to protesting as the only form of raising our voice instead of leveraging on the structures that we have. And this is what I believe, that if Generation Z. As I mentioned would be 25% of the global or the Pacific, uh, population by 2030, holding $140 billion in purchasing power. That's an incredible amount of power. It's not a story passed down to say the youth are future. It is literally statistically provable.
It's exists, and according to Deloitte and Gallim, uh, 2022. 70% of Generation Z and the millennials will choose to work for and perform activities for impactful goals. The change exists, it is currently happening, and, uh, I believe then that as we as leaders and corporate citizens rise up to making decisions to, to raising our concerns. Using the principles that are in place, leveraging of the sacrifices of our great leaders to bring the stage that we are in and not utilize old forms of resistance. Then we can intelligently, ethically, make a difference and influence what comes next responsibly, like we all should.
