The coronavirus has redefined the entirety of how humanity relates with itself, the environment and each other. Almost all arrangements that humanity devised to deal with economics, politics, science and technology, commerce, and education have been redefined. It has accelerated humanity into a world that was imagined, thus changing how human labour is traded in an open market.
One of the areas which has occupied humanity's attention to a level its contestation and management thereof is now a key determinant for the competitiveness of nations, is politics. Politics of a society, given their almost total reliance on interests as a currency with which to make political systems work, attract all breeds and creeds of persons to claim leadership. The organisation or arrangements with which humanity agrees to govern itself and thus form a government, otherwise also referred to as a democracy,have become a vocation whose plying has made government the ultimate prize of good politics.
How leaders of democracies are selected, appointed, and/or elected to manage democracies is one of the most contested of spaces within which the individual wills of humanity are aggregated into support for one policy position or another. In this circumstance humanity has over the years perfected this process through the institutionalisation of regular, free and fair elections. Elections and the accompanying rituals by coalitions organised around a set of policies have in this process become standardised as a pathway to political leadership of nations.
Such elections might be direct or derived from provisions in legislation regulating these. There may in certain instances be primaries of coalitions of common interests and principles, also called political parties, to determine who in society can be entrusted with the task of establishing government and allocate authority to exercise public power over the supply and demand dynamics occasioned by interest of individuals. This political leadership procurement process puts additional seasons that humanity has to deal with besides those that are determined by nature.
It is this nature of politics and the inherent power of government, as an agency of the state, that makes its use one of the most subjectively analysed processes. The extent to which instruments of exercising public power are used to sustain the very power is what would determine the autocratic and/or democratic nature of societies. Some democracies devise checks and balances to circumvent abuse of public power to the determinant of humanity.
However, natural catastrophe and mass impact calamities can occasion conditions where the suspension or tweaking of checks and balances is necessary in order to create 'martial law' type contexts that are generally appropriate to govern humanity in a state of fear. This fear incentivised arrangements to govern each other by humanity can, if not regularly reviewed through independent and transparent processes, be the bedrock upon which dictatorship are formed.
The general ability of humanity to believe in the benevolence of fellow beings, especially when the pool of credible leadership is depleted, can elevate cunningly charismatic breeds of leaders into positions of public power exercising. In contexts where such leaders can be creatures of a simple majority electoral process, the possibility of a resources manipulated leadership selection process becoming normative depending on traded benevolence becomes real.
It is when the acceptance of such leaders in their primaries is in question that their capacity to muster social cohesion outside the confines of a politically dominant coalition is compromised. The contest to entrench themselves as legitimate occupiers of positions in the coalition might in such circumstances require the use of public power to smoothen the process. Evidence in such democracies is the criminal justice system, together with its intelligence and surveillance power, is used to consolidate political power whose primal origins are questionable.
Conditions such as the COVID19 pandemic, whose management is anchored on the progressive reduction of super-spreader opportunities, most of whom are events wherein people congregate in large numbers for one purpose or another. The platforms with which political activity can be enjoyed become in this case super-spreading opportunities and can justifiably be restricted through the fear incentivised exercise of several public power mechanisms.
The vacuum of political power review through in-political coalition checks and balances such as sub-national elective conference and general councils is in the process created. Nature not being friendly with vacuums will deploy replacement, and in this case resourced and hegemonic fourth estate practitioners become natural and yet non-membership checks and balances of political coalitions. The resource prowess of the cognitive elite and capital endowed private persons naturally ascends the political space, and capture the political and social capital for their traditional capital accumulation interests and purposes.
Public policy decisions mutate in these contexts to being about the reconciliation of private capital interests. Commanding heights of economies have in most democracies found themselves in the hands of dynasties and private individuals. The Roosevelt new deal was able to put the US's energy security in private hands in the aftermath of the effects of the 1918 Flu pandemic, the 1929 depression and the Second World War. Similar case studies exist in developed democracies of the world.
It is the conclusion of this discussion that in conditions of national disaster, national emergency, and political leadership vacuums, societies might find themselves participating in their own suppression or manufacturing special type dictatorships. It is the vigilance of a special breed of cognitive elites that can be an antidote to the private benefit policies paraded as public benefit policies. Public power organised in a State requires extra vigilance by society when there is abundance of benevolence bestowed on leadership by an otherwise unsuspecting populace.
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🤷🏽♂️ Ho ti vulavulela nje, hi ku yini
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