Politics is like eating disorder. It is irritating and often causes distress but you cannot run away from it no matter how much you hate it.
For instance, in order to stay away from politics, you have not to comment about it but then you have to take a conscious decision not to comment and that requires one to think about it and thus, get into it.
You hear a lot of groaning about the lack of substance in our campaigns, especially during an election year. People always grumble that issues are taking the back seat to inanity. That our campaigns are conducted in manners that even the worst discourteous brute would not be proud of. Campaigns that are characterized by dreadful lies and brainless child games, portraying the election as though it was a football game where the referees are dimwitted but nevertheless better than the players.
Under the circumstances, we do not treat the election as a civic process to decide the direction of the country for the next five years and many more years to come. Our campaigns are characterized by shameless dishonesty, ceaseless moronic flip-flopping on issues and systematic promotion of hatred, defilement of common sense, bullying and screwing of the masses by the minority.
It is a game that reeks of unimaginable hypocrisy. You can loudly bash your opponents and their policies and programs today and the next day you sing songs of praise in their honor once you have been confirmed as a high profile recruit. I have come to appreciate that some people are just born stupid and there is nothing that can be done about it. It is their distinguishing quality.
You give them a calculator to work out the sum of four plus four (4+4) and they will still give you a wrong answer even though the calculator shows them the correct answer. These are pretty dumb fellows that I tolerate and relate well with so long as they do not pretend to be some genius.
Then there are these people who deliberately defile their mental faculties to get whatever they want.
These are smart people who are adequately schooled, certificated and possess a reasonable amount of intelligence. But these are chameleon-like witty people who would pledge to clean up the government only to crowd it with their sons, extended family members and lorry drivers. They would often plead for clean, dignified and gracious political contests while their campaign managers and foot-soldiers are some of the most foul-mouthed and dirty scoundrels on earth. Indeed politics is a game of crooks where smart tricksters screw the rest of us who are idiots, numbskulls and brain-dead imbeciles.
Now do you hate politics or crooked politicians or stupid voters who permit themselves to be screwed day in, day out? Thinking aloud, why are we (voters) always taken in by phony promises and stupid rhetoric all the time every time? It makes me hate myself that I have been conditioned to love and trust some of these blood-soaked crooks called politicians who thrive on demagoguery.
They are filled with every kind of wickedness and greed, full of deceit and malice and most are slanderers, arrogant and boastful. They persistently invent ways to get more than they give.
I can cope with a lot of stuff such as the irritating noise of rock music or na├»ve drunks. I can cope with not having a credit card or a mobile phone when some beneficiaries of the destitute allowance have more than two sets. But I am irritated by self-made dolts. These are intelligent people who literally don’t buy into 90% of their own stories. These are the people who take pride in the language of naked deception and doublespeak. Of course it is often pretty difficult to distinguish between those who act for it and those who are factually stupid.
There are sophisticated crooks, cheats and fake politicians everywhere. Sample this. An experienced, accomplished top civil servant turned politician ask voters to cast their votes for just anybody who happens to be running for political office on a Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) ticket (because what matters is not the quality in the individual but the party programs as if the programs are not devised by people) and you despair and wish they have been misquoted or that such was never reported to the rest of the world.
When a full Vice-President zooms to Bobirwa to warn voters that it would be an insult if they do not support the state president who also happens to be their Chief, you wish the rest of the world was not listening or else our children’s applications for admission into European universities could be rejected on account of being associated with the Vice President’s nationality.
The utterances by the Vice President seemed thinly veiled threats to some sort of second class citizens who seem to be squatting on other people’s land.
Of course many Babirwa bought into the threats and allowed themselves to be screwed for the tenth time since attainment of political independence (on account of their tribal inferiority).
The state president then roams about scolding and rebuking some constituents that their villages are underdeveloped because they have been voting for opposition political parties. In a more civilized society then ours, this unethical remark would have been enough to warrant an immediate public apology or instant resignation but we are in Botswana where powerful people do as they please.
Amid calls for a review of the national constitution, one big legislator argues against a wholesale review because that would be costly. He instead proposes a piece-meal approach to cut costs. Gosh! You have four (4) eggs to fry and you choose to fry one egg at a time to save cooking gas. Stylish absurdity!
The worst tragedy however is that many of these clowns find themselves in positions of relative power and influence which gives them an excellent opportunity to pollute many other people, specially the rest of us, inferior beings who are even more asinine and always willing to bark in unison like guard dogs. Of course the smart politicians know that the garbage-pickers called voters will do the needful and believe their weird thoughts given their bloated inferiority.
The disconnection between (their) words and action makes you wish for divine intervention to alter the course of evolution so that we do not breed many more generational crooks and pathological liars. An outspoken politician in New Zealand once proposed to government to pay the underclass (parents who give their children no hope or opportunity from the moment they are born) large sums of money so that they do not breed with a view to addressing the poverty cycle. I would contribute to that fund to be used to pay us with a view to limiting the breeding of more and more clueless voters and political fraudsters.
One thing that is increasingly becoming clear though is that the current political climate forces us to cast votes for people that we not only do not like but may not even know. It forces voters to choose between pathological liars and fools by birth. After all a majority of voters decide who they are going to vote for even before they actually know the contestants. It is this peculiar lack of dignity of our politics that anyone can aspire to be a member of parliament.
You just have to belong to the right party and sometimes you don’t even have to campaign because voters, with a fatal combination of arrogant naivety and carelessness, will do the right thing.
My Nigerian friend told me that if I want to become a winner and a seasoned politician, I have to take some crash courses in the art of lying and insincerity. This may sound blunt and simplistic but if you survive on selling some wares, you eventually learn the tricks and schemes for ripping customers off. Over time politicians make a career out of lying and doublespeak spiced with a little bit of stupidity. They keep lying and even get more resolved to lie even though they know that voters are aware that they are lying.
But they will continue lying because they know that the slum dwellers will carry on pulling their carts while they ride in comforts. After all politicians often lie because we expect them to have solutions to all our problems including our bad habits such as perpetual discharge of natural air from the inside. They also lie because we accord them a saintliness status which compels them to lie in order to appear knowledgeable and impress all and sundry. They have to present an outlook that is conveniently consistent with our expectations of them. After all we seem to expect them to grant us a better life even when a majority of them are not any better.
I know there are well meaning and honest politicians out there but the behaviors and manners of the majority makes all of them special species of the animal kingdom.
The very moment they put on their party colors, you have to become a super moron to really make sense of their promises. You could even think of using that chewing gum in your mouth to block your ears so that you don’t hear the rubbish, though you always want to listen. Yet again you try to stay away from politicians and their mundane stories but you keep wanting to listen for the last time to really confirm you got them right. Of course there are fewer choices.
You can either be a politician and be known as a crafty smart crook or you are a voter who is screwed all the time or you try to become neither of the two but you realize your future is actually crafted by their bizarre actions and you become a far much bitter fool.
Consequently, it seems we are all fools but politicians are far dumber though they lead better lives and have far much better behaved dogs than most of us do.
