Our nature as humanity includes the pursuit of power to create, change and influence our space or living conditions. This quest has overtime been found to be responsible for most of the conflicts amongst us. Our interests are what defines the need to influence and create to alter our conditions. The science of managing or reconciling those interests is called politics. It is a contestation terrain out of which the dominant interests of those that win the contest becomes the vector of all other interests.
In essence this means the will of the people, or their aggregated interests as defined by coalitions they establish to pursue them, define, and in Lincolnian parlance, a 'of the people, by the people, for the people' context, also called democracy. Humanity has thus agreed to regulate these wills of the people through an electoral process which is free, fair and regular. In this process people are supposedly given a chance to select amongst 'available' options a coalition that best represents their interests, and posit into that coalition rights to 'use public power' on their behalf to create,make and influence their livelihood.
The race therefore for the control of 'public power' or to be 'organs of state' has become one of the fiercely contested by humanity. The distributional power of being an 'organ of state' and thus catalytic to operations of government as an agency of the State, has made the business of influencing 'public power' a point of interest. Lobby groups, state capturers, foreign intelligence agencies, and many other human interest coalitions have been established at the instance of ensuring that wherever 'public power' exists, it should be influenced to never out of variance with their 'interests'.
The above condition has thus made the interests of those that can dominate in the definition of what is in the interest of society to be what society contests for. The day to day needs of society will in such circumstances be packaged as part of complexes defining other interests. The right to water, electricity, public transport, and lately data will be packaged as part of the right to the private sector to provide such services. In this whirlpool of interest calibration, 'the people' are mobilised in their coalition to support these rights outside the implications packages with them.
It is in the abstract nature of these packaged interests, also called election manifestos, that the people find themselves in a state of trance about what are they in fact involved with. In this confusion, the power of the people to influence whomever the borrow their public power to, mutates into a spiritual matter. Their vote becomes a form of prayer. In voting, they are in fact kneeling to a democracy to give them what they hope it understands are their needs. Only their faith in the system drives their voting choices, otherwise their living conditions are a good reason not to be involved in the outsourcing of their public power.
Prayer, defined in simple terms as a solemn request or an earnest hope or wish, is one of the activities humanity engages in, and manages the accountability for its execution away from whomever they prayed to, and yet have the faith that their prayer is heard. When you pray, you surrender the power to respond to what you pray for, to the one you believe will. In poor societies 'public power' wielding 'organs of state' or 'agencies of the state' have become a form of 'deity' that voting has firmly moved into a prayer realm.
The rituals of social welfarism etched on voter disempowerment instead of investment in building independent self-resourced humans, entrenched the near god status of those that give out freebies in return for the vote. The promises of grants, and handing out of t-shirts, some of which end up being genuine clothing for the poor, creates condition where the 'deity' that political coalitions have become makes voting a prayer.
The voter prayer is. Our Party who art at headquarters, hallowed be thy manifesto, Thy governing party status come, Thy will be done in our country as it is in your imagination. Give us this term our termite promises. Forgive us our ignorances, as we forgive those that also ignored us. Lead us not into the temptation of thinking differently about voting. But deliver us from further ignorance. For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory. Cut!!!
🤷🏽♂️A ndzo ti vulavulela
🤷🏽♂️Be ngisho nje
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