Inspired by the words of Shadrach Egblorla Ahiati: "A General without a rank isn't one. Behind a true General with a rank is the SCARS, the SACRED: Sacrifice, Endurance, Patience, The God Factor. The Dream Is Still Solidified." (2024)
There is something nobody tells you about becoming a leader. They show you the podium, the title, the handshake, the photograph. They do not show you what it cost to get there. They do not show you the nights you sat alone wondering if you had read the room completely wrong, or the mornings you woke up with a vision so heavy it felt less like purpose and more like punishment.
They do not show you the scars.
But the scars are the point. Not as consolation for suffering, but as structural reality. Behind every leader who has earned genuine authority, not appointment, not rank, not title, but the kind that makes rooms go quiet and people lean forward, there is a formation process that left marks. Those marks are not incidental to the leadership. They constitute it.
This is the truth Shadrach Egblorla Ahiati compressed into a single declaration: a General without a rank is not one. And behind every true General with a rank is something sacred. Those sacred elements form what I call SCARS: Sacrifice, Endurance, Patience, and the God Factor. Alongside it sits a second truth that I believe deserves its own articulation. Loyalty is the consequence of leadership, and leadership is the touchstone of competence.
Sacrifice: The Price Nobody Quotes You Upfront
When I assumed my first position as SRC President at Spiritan University College in 2020, I thought I understood what I was stepping into. I was wrong in the most instructive way possible. Leadership during a pandemic that had stripped students of normalcy was not a title. It was a constant negotiation between what I wanted to do, what was possible, and what the people I represented actually needed. Those three things are almost never the same.
The most transformative sacrifices in leadership are quiet. They are the sleep surrendered to preparation. The personal comfort deferred in service of a constituency's need. The private uncertainty carried alone because allowing it to become public would cost others their confidence.
Sacrifice is not primarily about what you give up. It is about what you refuse to give up on. The vision. The people. The responsibility. Holding those things when everything else is uncertain, that is where sacrifice becomes formation. And what it builds, invisibly, over time, is the credibility from which loyalty eventually grows. People do not follow sacrifice. They follow what sacrifice reveals about character.
Endurance: Staying When Leaving Would Have Been Easier
By the time I moved through the welfare and international committees of USAG and into the corridors of NUGS itself, I had learned something about endurance that I could not have learned any other way. Endurance is not stubbornness. It is informed persistence. It is choosing to stay in a fight not because you have not felt the blows, but because you understand what you are fighting for.
There were moments I wanted to walk away. Moments where institutional resistance was so thick and bureaucratic indifference so complete that continuing felt less like courage and more like pride refusing to yield. I had to learn to tell the difference, to separate the times when staying meant something real from the times when I was simply too stubborn to reassess.
Endurance also reveals who is truly with you. Adversity separates the people who follow because of what you provide from those who follow because of who you are. The ones who stay when it is hard, who defend the work in rooms you are not in, those people are not with you by accident. Their loyalty is the direct consequence of your character under fire.
Patience: The Discipline That Looks Like Doing Nothing
Patience is the most misunderstood virtue in a leader's toolkit. From the outside, it looks like passivity, like someone who does not want it badly enough. What it actually is, is strategic. Patience is knowing that your moment exists and that forcing it before it is ready does not make you bold. It makes you premature.
Some of the most important things I wanted to happen in my seasons of leadership did not happen on my timeline. They happened later, shaped by groundwork I had laid and relationships I had built through the quiet consistency of showing up when it was inconvenient. You cannot manufacture that. You can only tend it.
This is also where competence reveals itself. Not in the flash of early talent, but in the sustained quality of judgement over time. Loyalty is the consequence of leadership, and leadership is the touchstone of competence. You cannot fake it indefinitely. You can fake analytical rigour with confident delivery. You can fake emotional intelligence in a single interview. You cannot fake, across years and genuine difficulty, the character that authentic leadership requires.
The God Factor: The Thread That Held Everything Together
I would be dishonest if I told this story without naming the one thread that ran through all of it. Through every election, every committee, every sleepless stretch of service, there was something holding the architecture of my life together that I did not build myself.
I call it the God Factor. Not as a footnote or a polite religious courtesy, but as the central structural fact of everything I have experienced. When the dream was too heavy for me to carry, something larger than me carried it. When the path forward was genuinely unclear, clarity came from somewhere I cannot take credit for. When people wrote me off, when the season looked like failure, when I had given everything and it still felt insufficient, I was held.
That is not metaphor. That is memory. The leader who acknowledges this is not weaker for it. They lead with an openness that others experience as safety. They admit uncertainty without losing authority, because their authority was never based on the pretence of omniscience. And people trust that. It generates loyalty because it generates safety.
The Dream Is Still Solidified
A rank without scars is not leadership. It is administration. It is not the thing that moves people, holds institutions together in crisis, or carries a vision further than the vision-holder's own life.
The dream, in this framework, is a solidified conviction, tested by sacrifice, sustained through endurance, refined by patience, and held by grace. It does not require the road to be smooth. It only requires the leader to be formed.
There are people reading this right now who are in the middle of their own version of what I have described. You are in a season that feels like it is costing more than it is producing. You are carrying a vision people around you cannot yet see. You are serving in rooms where your contribution is felt but not yet formally recognised.
Hear this clearly: the dream is still solidified. Stay in the work. Let the God Factor hold what your hands are too tired to carry tonight.
The loyalty will come. The rank will come. But who you become on the way to them, that is the real promotion. And that becoming, once it has happened, can never be taken from you.
The scars are there. The dream is solidified. The general is still forming.
Emmanuel Mawuli Tsikata served as Chairman of the International Relations Committee of NUGS (2024 to 2025), Deputy Chief Justice of NUGS (2023 to 2024), Chairman of the International Student Committee of USAG (2022 to 2023), Chairman of the Welfare Committee of USAG (2021 to 2022), and SRC President of Spiritan University College (2020 to 2021).