Vote! All Ye Fools Vote….

I purposefully wrote and published this article precisely after the ‘demonstration of craze’ which is the national general election that was conducted and won by the ruling party, as reports of the result show. A friend of mine the other day pointed out something very crucial to the social theory of democracy and liberal politics, but also hilarious in a humorous sense. Referring to the elections and history of the ‘African Vote’: “Sibusiso, you must remember that we have only voted four times democratically as a people post colonialization/apartheid. Some people have been voting for a couple of centuries. When we go vote we are not even sure whether to put a ‘tick’ or and ‘X’ or maybe an ‘X-tick’, let alone the actual vote itself“. It’s humorous because what he is implying is that Africans in post colonial Africa do not know how to vote. It’s incredibly crucial in the deconstruction of the social theory of democracy and liberal politics in post apartheid South Africa because of the nature of concessions made to inculcate the current constitution. My question is why vote in the place? When Mangaliso R. Sobukwe was trialed by the regime in the early 1960’s, he chose to plead neither guilty nor not guilty. Instead, he lambasted the regime as being illegitimate, a foreign and strange law that was imposed by a minority and a majority. A system that practiced separate development philosophies in the form of segregation laws giving birth to Bantustans that churned out thousands of cheap migrant laborers who were compelled to do so, so as to pay poll and hut taxed imposed by the then Union of South Africa when they constructed the land act of 1913. Now today, liberation movements and other political parties are rallying for people’s votes whilst the current constitution holds close to its ethos the blueprints of the land act of 1913(thanks to neo-liberal right-wing wingers guised as communists), hence less than 8% of the land taken through colonial expansion has been redistributed. How can people be asked to vote for an illegitimate state? People voted a week ago, but they are still hungry, homeless and deprived of information. Status quo remains the same, but the call to vote is revolution. The true movement of the people should not need a vote. In fact it should not be even be a revolution, but an evolution. We must move from point A to B with pure logic. Paradigm shifts must not revolve but evolve at a constant rate. One might ask what does all this mean. The state has no power, but us the people who legitimize it. It is again us who are to null and void it. I can’t shake the feeling that as we move out of the election fever into a term of political uncertainty yet gain in Mzansi, all the ‘house niggers’ , ‘uncle sams’ or ‘Mr. buffalos’ guaranteed rigged parliamentary seats are out there jubilating and ululating , “Vote, All ye fools vote!”