One thing is very clear, and that is, lately, Batswana are an angry people, very furious indeed. We are easily provoked and our conversations are interspersed with howls of outrage at anything that we don’t approve. Local newspapers are also full of moral outrage at
I still recall former Speaker of the National Assembly, Dr Margaret Nasha remarking that former President Khama was an angry man whose decisions are based on emotions.
We will also recall that in the last few years, Batswana have consistently been characterized as one the unhappiest people in the world. Naturally, anger often times manifest in uncontrolled spontaneous fits of aggression towards other people or objects.
Anger is an expression of unhappiness and can be destructive especially when an angry person does not find an appropriate target to relieve the rage. Sadly, this is where our society finds itself today.
Since politics is one of the most important human activities in any society and since everything we do is politics or is influenced by politics, it would mean that anger would find expression in political activities more than anywhere else.
Our expressions of anger can readily be found in the language political activists use towards political opponents. We also conveniently express our anger through spontaneous acts of aggression that we often display publicly without any remorse whatsoever.
This is in spite that Batswana have always been humble and private, people who believed in negotiating through disagreements than resorting to violence as the first option. Batswana used characterize public display of anger as a sign of lack of maturity or a cowardly act of thuggery.
At the time, Batswana were known to be a well-bred, civil and refined society to the extent that even White people with an inveterate hatred for Blacks tolerated us for being unique and indeed different from other primates in Africa.
This is not to imply that Batswana never experienced bursts of anger as did other people, but that we never commoditized anger, neither did we convince ourselves that rage was a profitable emotion.
Rather, we managed anger in a way that set us apart from other primates lacking a conscience. However, of recent, it seems Batswana are returning to the animal kingdom and have come to believe that anger works, such that it presumed that whipping peoples’ emotions will work wonders, especially in politics.
In our new world, anger has come to serve some purpose hence people want to constantly show that they are very angry by hurling insults and making threats against individuals and institutions they disagree with.
Whereas in the past we believed in resolving disputes through a conversation, today we have normalized violence as a solution to our differences. Opportunistic as always, politicians have become famed merchants of anger who use bellicose rhetoric to feed public fury for their own electoral advantage.
As a result, political parties have become angry mobs with apparent disdain for one another. Indeed anger does play a crucial role in political campaigns for it is believed that it has a mobilization effect as it get people out of their comfort zones to the public space to vent and act.
This mobilization effect often manifests itself as a desire to injure and demonize those on the other side of the political aisle. In consequence, political activists, especially opposition activists, have taken to sustain the anger in the voters so that there is limited opportunity to cool down, get informed and act rationally.
Angry voters obviously have their mental faculties adulterated and are most likely to act irrationally since their immediate goal would be to satisfy their desire to bring down their competitors.
For politicians, the idea behind this ‘project anger’ is to cause voters to injure by any means those we believe are responsible for our misery. Our new politics is now anchored on a desire to harm those we believe have hurt us and/or to squash our competitors in the most violent ways.
This ‘project anger’ has amplified partisan politics to the extent that our competitors have become our sworn enemies and political competition has transformed into a violent fight between gangsters wherein the ultimate aim is to demonize and/or literally destroy those we do not agree with.
As a result, political competition is no longer about debating topical issues but rather about attacking verbally and physically imagined sources of our disappointment. In effect, the partisan vitriol in speech and action is now over the top and suggests a society that sees enemies everywhere.
Politicians tend to believe that anger emanating from feelings of injustice prompts people to act in order to kick out those in power hence anger is used as a political weapon, especially by the opposition.
In their belief that anger stimulates mobilization in as far as it generates a desire for change, opposition activists have taken to blame their opponents for any misfortune under the sun with the hope that people will be infuriated.
For the opposition bloc, the aim is to blame the ruling BDP for all things that afflict our society, from economic crisis perpetuated by Covid-19 pandemic; gender based violence; global warming and so forth.
This explains why opposition activists keep recycling old scandalous stories in order to sustain the people’s anger. The aim is to ensure that voters remain sufficiently furious at the ruling establishment.
Indeed anger does cause people to support anti-establishment groups or parties. Whereas it is universally accepted that ager is useful in politics, especially for campaigns, anger can also produce an unexpected demobilizing effect on voters, especially in the case of Botswana where the ruling party has been in power since political independence in 1966.
The ruling BDP has won all general elections in Botswana in spite some of its prominent members featuring in almost all high profile corruption cases. As a result of the BDP’s longevity which is essentially their ability to survive when everyone has written them off, any hopes for regime change are diminished.
This is so because when voters are angry at a system that they believe they cannot change and have actually failed to change after more than 10 attempts, the mobilization effect of anger is compromised and/or completely neutralized.
While it is common to be angry at something we cannot change, the reality is that anger has to have a beneficial effect and when it doesn’t, it results in the opposite by making people to accept the status quo or distance themselves from politicians who still nurse hopes for regime change.
To some greater extent, when voters become angry with the intransigent ruling establishment, and when such anger fails to cause voters to remove the ruling BDP, a sense of hopelessness kicks in, resulting in passive anger, just a pretense of anger.
Such feelings of hopelessness are often accompanied by a strong distrust and dislike for politics and politicians irrespective of whether they are in the opposition side or on the side of the ruling establishment.
When angry voters develop a dislike for politics and politicians, the vitriol on public display would then be just for venting rather than for seeking regime change, with voters citing that politicians are the same and/or that regime change simply is a matter of substituting tried and tested bandits for unfamiliar bandits with a penchant for instant riches.
In similar ways, anger may lead to decreased political participation as voters loose interests in politics. Thus, the long term effect of anger on political behavior is such that voters get to become focused on showing off their anger than channeling it towards socio-political change.
Relatedly, it is a fact that angry voters cannot be relied on because of mood swings that are accompanied a distorted view of reality. Mostly they take decisions based on emotions.
Concluding, it is posited that inciting voter anger is patently counterproductive especially in a political environment such as ours where chances for regime change diminish with every general election, whether on account of a free and fair voting or on account of rigging.
That is the irony of the anger formula!!
