The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Winston Churchill is alleged to have argued that democracy is the worst form of government except for all other forms that have not been tried.
Scholars are not agreed on what Churchill exactly meant by those words but it is generally understood that he was suggesting that there might be other forms of government that have not yet been tried that are better or worse than democracy.
Today I argue that elections are the best form of negotiating power, sharing it and choosing leaders except for those other methods of doing so that we have not yet tried. So I will critique the coloniality of elections without exactly respecting the intellectual obligation to suggest alternatives to them. My friend, the recently departed Dr Kenneth Hashi Tafira had started a research project whose interest was to critically prove that elections were a luxury that Africa could not afford or needed.
Tragically, the Africa Decolonial Research Network intellectual family lost Hashi before he could publish some articles or a book debunking elections from a decolonial perspective.
Most scholars in politics and administration locate the origins of elections in ancient Athens. Others point to Rome. And others recall how the Popes were elected and selected through elections.
From the 17th Century when the idea of the divine right of kings was dethroned partly with the ideas of philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others, in the West elections became a method of navigating and negotiating power with the participation and consent of the multitudes and masses of the people.
In that way, elections are a political and philosophical artefact of democratic thinking. Elections emerge from the thinking about representative democracy and the delegation of individual leaders and parties to power by the multitudes.
Elections have been developed and modified to the different types and styles that are found in different parts of the wide world. By 1920 in North America almost all males, white males, had the right to vote. Blacks and women were allowed the right to vote later on.
In Britain women were only allowed to vote in 1928 while in France they achieved the vote in 1944 and Belgium in 1949. In wonderful Switzerland women only earned the vote as recently as 1971. Voting and elections at large would seem to be a male and also fundamentally adult political privilege as there is a strict age limit to when exactly the young can start voting, everywhere in the world.
The Gift of the Vote
In the beginning there was the sword, the spear and the bullet and then democracy said let there be the ballot, and then there was democratic voting, Amen.
Elections are credited with being a civilised and democratic, peaceful alternative to war. Ballots are considered modern replacements of the weapon that was used to eliminate the political enemy in primitive times. That is where the dialectic of the ballot and the bullets comes from.
Elections are supposed to give human beings the dignity and respectability of rational choice of leaders and peaceful political competition. In a way elections are believed to be an alternative to the law of the jungle that valorises the survival of the fittest and the rule of the brute.
Lately elections are so technologised to allow secrecy and confidentiality of voting and the vote is supposed to belong to an individual’s conscience and not for public consumption and display. The best and most popular leaders and representatives of the people are produced through voting in free, fair and also credible elections throughout the world.
For that reason, elections are supposed to give legitimacy and credibility to leaders who now have to rule by popular endorsement. Elections are also linked to ideas and practices of development and progress as elected leaders are mandated to make laws, implement them and champion development.
A central part of the rule of law and order is played by elections that encourage losers to support winners and winners to respect losers in what almost turns politics into a very clean game of gentlemen and gentlewomen.
For helping us achieve all that political civility and gentility elections are truly supposed to be one of the greatest inventions in the world, a trophy of our civilisation and a sweet fruition of modernity.
The Coloniality of Elections
Kenneth Tafira observed that, especially for Africa, elections are too expensive for our polities and economies. Africa, as poor as it is, spends large amounts of money on partisan political campaigns, electoral processes and materials that are quickly exhausted instead of investing in human interests and lives, in such sectors as health, education and infrastructural development.
I note that elections are emotionally vexing and therefore psychologically taxing and expensive in that way. Votes and the emotive politics that go with it are the cause of much anger and enmity, instead of replacing war elections and their permanently unsatisfactory outcomes have been the cause for wars and genocides.
There is a myth which is also a fallacy that elections allow the rule of the majority. Almost in every country, except where voting is compulsory, the people that register and participate in elections are a pathetic minority compared to the majority that are not interested, that are interested but do not qualify, that cannot afford to vote and are kept away from the important decision making process that elections come and go with.
Elections permit a criminal dictatorship of the minority over the majority, I observe. It is also important to note that the poor and illiterate are systematically and structurally excluded from elections.
Almost everywhere in the world candidates who stand for elections should, in one way or another be literate and propertied people that are nominated by a certain number of citizens.
Voters are requested to provide proof of their addresses when registering and being propertied and sheltered is a condition for being eligible. One may argue that capitalism has commodified elections as a luxury and privilege of the moneyed and propertied class with the poor being brought in to endorse what has been decided already by hegemonic individuals and classes.
Choosing one candidate instead of another or others has elements of true discrimination and favouritism that may not only be irrational but also contemptuous and hateful.
Not only in Africa and the Global South at large but everywhere in the world elections divide people into camps and factions that are hostile and tend to sabotage each other’s work and contribution to development in government.
In their contestations political parties also invest so much energy in preventing each other from delivering to their promises than co-operating in delivering to democracy and development.
In Africa specifically, elections divide parties and populations into ethnic groupings where bigger tribes can easily monopolise power using the stamina of numbers and not the quality of ideas and leadership, allowing corruption and dictatorship to thrive.
In some parts of Africa elections have become tribal censuses and not democratic processes. Popular candidates that win elections are not necessarily performing candidates but elections privilege popularity ahead of performance.
Majorities that win elections can also be wrong but they prevail and dangerous leaders may be voted into power by mistaken and sometimes misguided voters and followers. Popularity can also be bought and sold in the political marketplace as a product that the moneyed can afford.
A lot of political fanaticism and fundamentalism is encouraged in political campaigns and the elections themselves and national unity and nation building may suffer as people are forced to jostle and compete bitterly for power. The history of elections being rigged and being manipulated is as old as the history of elections themselves.
Some political philosophers have argued that a free and fair election cannot be possible as all elections have an element of unfairness and injustice.
The record holder in fraudulent elections of all time is Liberia in 1927 where the winner, Charles D. King, despite of there being less than 15 000 people that registered to vote and voted, received a screaming 243 000 votes compared to the loser who garnered a respectable 9 000 votes. In other countries similar but less spectacular examples exist.
The electoral field can be a corrupt terrain.
Instead of eliminating rule by dynasties and bloodlines elections in some ways facilitate the rule of hegemonic bloodlines and kinds of partisan and personalised dynasties.
Contrary to popular views elections are not won or lost in the actual votes counted but in the social history and backgrounds that precede them, we can discuss the political economy of elections. So many factors come into the winning and losing of elections besides fair voting and free counting of ballots.
There are not only margins of error but also margins of terror, fear and poverty that influence voting patterns and tendencies.
The voter as a political consumer exists in a precarious and multi-directional climate, one day we should study political consumer behaviour as a complex field.
I think elections are a true gift to humanity and politics but inventive scholars should continue to think of other forms of navigating and negotiating power that are more empowering, inclusive, freer and fairer than the way of the ballot.
For now, let us enjoy elections, make them as free, and as just as possible.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Braamfontein, Johannesburg, in South Africa: [email protected].
