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Unemployment & Public Rallies: A Comment on the leaders we yearn for ...


A comment on the large crowds often witnessed at public rallies and more recently pact signings, and the continued castigation of them by a middle-class tweeting and blogging away at their businesses, in their cars and at places of work, for being unemployed idlers being misled by a political elite that feels nothing for them.

Is it not a genuine concern that any leader worth his salt ought to be concerned about even while ‘pacting’ away? As they sign away to share spoils, an eager and expectant crowd watches on – chanting their names out loud.   

Why are these many people here …. “well am popular and a tribal chief in my own right” … but then again; it is in the middle of the week, a Monday, a Tuesday – days that essentially ought to be the most productive days of the week, did they seek or get the day off work?
They are there because like every other five years they hope that the ‘pacting’ is FOR ONCE about job creation and the general welfare of the citizenry, not about who gets the spoils after the forth coming gruesome political battle, aren’t they?

I read a very interesting book – The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State , by Basil Davidson (I thoroughly recommend it despite the many criticisms leveled against it). It talks about the prevailing political situation in which citizens merely remain present as existential phenomena …. But are absent as participating actors. He gives an example of East Germany where after the Berlin rising, official leaflets of the government informed “the people” that they had “forfeited the confidence of the government” - in which case “would it not have been simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

If any leader is ‘pacting’ covertly or overtly at the KICC or Jivanjee gardens, surrounded by mammoth crowds and not for once thinks (because that is how we feel when during five years they act as though they do not give a rat’s ass) about why all these people are not at their places of work, then they are simply not worth either e-effort (as the tweeters and blogging middle class has been termed) or actual rally attendance effort!

My Take_ 

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