The Sunday News
Michael Mhlanga
Voters vote in order to express themselves. In Zimbabwe, voting is a consumption activity rather than a productive activity; it is more like reading a book for pleasure than it is like reading a book to develop a new skill.
On this front, though the act of voting is private, voters regard voting as an apt way to demonstrate and express their commitment to their political team. Voting is like wearing a Mukanya T-shirt at a concert or doing the wave at a soccer game.
Sports fans who paint their faces with team colours do not generally believe that they, as individuals, will change the outcome of the game, but instead wish to demonstrate their commitment to their team. Even when watching games alone, sports fans cheer and clap for their teams. Perhaps voting is like this.
This Sunday I want to show how many of the voters have been absorbed by what is called the bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is a phenomenon in which the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others.
In other words, the bandwagon effect is characterised by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so.
As more people come to believe in something, others also hop on the bandwagon regardless of the underlying evidence.
The tendency to follow the actions or beliefs of others is occurring because individuals directly prefer to conform, or because individuals derive information from others. Both explanations have been used for evidence of conformity in psychological experiments.
According to this concept, the increasing popularity of a product or phenomenon encourages more people to get on the bandwagon, too. The bandwagon effect can also explain why there are fashion trends.
When individuals make rational choices based on the information they receive from others, economists have proposed that “information cascades” can quickly form in which people decide to ignore their personal information signals and follow the behaviour of others.
Cascades explain why behaviour is fragile, people understand that they are based on very limited information.
As a result, fads form easily, but are also easily dislodged. Such informational effects can be used to explain Zimbabwe’s political bandwagons.
The definition of a bandwagon, is a cart which carries a band during the course of a parade, circus or other entertainment event. The phrase “jump on the bandwagon” first appeared in American politics in 1848 when Dan Rice, a famous and popular circus clown of the time, used his bandwagon and its music to gain attention for his political campaign appearances.
As his campaign became more successful, other politicians strove for a seat on the bandwagon, hoping to be associated with his success. Later, during the time of William Jennings Bryan’s 1900 presidential campaign, bandwagons had become standard in American campaigns, and the phrase “jump on the bandwagon” was used as a suitable descriptive term, implying that people were associating themselves with success without considering that with which they associated themselves.
I have come to a conclusion that the bandwagon effect will occur in 2018 voting, like it has for the past elections, however, with adverse effects this time.
I am afraid that this time, those excited about jumping on the wagon are the youth, the first time voter who hasn’t been witness to past wagons, particularly in town and cities that did not arrive at their terminus.
The cart that has accustomed itself with pounding its passengers, aspiring drivers and is ignorant of road rules.
This cart seemingly has attracted a new band, excited of the journey whose outcome, the elders have learnt is callous, definite and deplorable. This is the bandwagon many are seeing in the name of Generational Consensus (G-C).
Within the bandwagon politics, some people vote for those candidates or parties who are likely to succeed (or are proclaimed as such by the media), hoping to be on the “winner’s side” in the end.
The bandwagon effect can be applied to situations involving majority opinion, such as political outcomes, where people alter their opinions to the majority view. Such a shift in opinion occurring because individuals are drawing inferences from the decisions of others, as in an informational cascade.
To locate the election psychology, let me take you to one painstaking truth about our country, and this should be thought of immediately in order to emerge truly transformed after November 2017. Zimbabwean politics, just like popular African politics, is remarkable for its lack of policy-driven parties.
Instead, politics orbits around personalities where men like Morgan Tsvangirai, Raila Odinga, and Robert Mugabe have been at the core of the business of politics in their parties. Everything revolved around them.
Their political parties had no distinct identity; they were synonymous with the party leader. Centred on a personality, often times at his whims, these parties faced political oblivion once the leader exited the political stage.
Zanu-PF was facing that threat, and it made a chess move last November. MDC-T was in the same predicament, but they failed to escape the trap hence the nascent struggle and failure to move on from Tsvangirai politics, and surely, what Grace Mugabe once mis-proclaimed in that year, that her husband will rule from the grave, is in fact evident in opposition.
Sorry to say this, MDC-T is haunted — haunted by past failures and it has imported what failed expecting a different outcome.
For the party to adopt a “T” as a signifier of ownership, it was in response to political clashes which were a product of indiscipline and insulting electoral intelligence. When the party became a “T”, we were notified of how personality supersedes ideas and precedes the institution.
The passing away of the individual could have been the internment of wrong politics, but the public were treated as “subjects” who are only capable of following individuals and are not allowed to challenge misnomers that had been created by an individual.
Agree or deny, the MDC had seen many splits and it was clear that the reason was a contest and conflict of characters competing for popular personality. Zimbabwe’s opposition struggle was defined as beginning and ending with an individual hence when individuals exited the discussion plain, many were left with nothing or little, to challenge the dispensation.
Let me remind many again that the exit of Robert Mugabe left opposition with no mantra; the resting of Morgan Tsvangirai left the opposition with no character to create a dramatic conflict.
The clash of Tsvangirai with Mugabe was like of a hero and a villain in a play, the absence of one means the uselessness of the other (you may allocate roles to each of them). It was coincidentally unfortunate that they both left the attentive politics almost at the same time, albeit in different circumstances.
What becomes exclusively different and important is how each party dealt with the exit of theirs and how their supporters reacted. Both, as I have argued above, had possessed their parties (well, the other with a “T” and the other with his family). The actions of both men had a rapturous effect on the common man’s life.
Take for instance what had become routine recalls from Parliament by Morgan Tsvangirai and serial witch-hunts and deplorable diplomacy by Grace Mugabe in the youth interface denigrating respectable people and capturing public institutions in trail. All these internal party misnomers created by individuals whose parties were now centred on them.
The throngs of supporters had jumped on the bandwagon and wanted to be associated with power in both camps.
Aspirations of looting, unscrupulous public appointments and evading justice were secured by these individuals yet this was paralysing good practices in politics.
It’s appalling that many did not see it this way or indecisively thought November 2017 marked the beginning of new politics within Zanu-PF only. I see November and February as symbolic months that were meant to frame new politics of loyalty to institutional ideas not individuals. It’s further enervating to see how opposition created and prospered on a personality cult, protracts politics curated around an individual.
When they parade their G-C, they tell many that it is the aspirations of young people to be included in the governance of the country.
Yet conveniently, the narrative emerges after Tsvangirai and the one who “imposed” himself is apparently fit for a “generational consensus”.
Conveniently, that narrative would pull the multitude of the new voter, the one who less understands existing dynamics in societal organisation in Zimbabwe, whose privilege of knowing the truth about the “new” man to represent generational needs is, this is the dire situation that bandwagon jumpers are in.
It is important to decide today, are you going to be a bandwagon jumper or a disciple of your own ideas?
While you are thinking . . .
Yikho khona lokhu
