Who is the better leader on The Walking Dead: Rick or Negan?

Meeting Basic Needs

Once a community has been established the leader must figure out how to meet the basic needs like food and water for all the people who live there. Deanna was working on doing that for Alexandria before she died. Maggie worked with her to plan out growing crops and ways to keep the community going.

But Deanna is gone. And Rick has been struggling to make sure that the whole community has what it needs. The Atlanta survivors have never really been in one place long enough to worry about keeping a community going. They have survived by scavenging, sharing what they find, and rationing their meager supplies.

Alexandria has a lot of resources that other communities don’t have. It has electricity, running water, cisterns and septic systems already set up. It has land within the walls suitable for growing food. But still Rick had to make a deal with Hilltop to get food. Alexandria is not self-supporting yet.

And the deal that Rick made to get a few week’s worth of food and some livestock was a bad one. It got Glenn and Abe killed. It put the group on Negan’s radar and now the community is forced to give up supplies to the Saviors.

Negan’s tactics of demanding half of the supplies of all the other communities is brutal and unfair. But it works. It gives the people of Sanctuary enough food and other supplies to stay alive and keep going. Sure, some people live better than others in Sanctuary. But everyone survives, if they work and contribute.

Negan takes the win when it comes to meeting the basic needs of the community.