THE VOTER, THE RETURNING OFFICER AND THE FUTURE OF KENYA

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CHINUA ACHEBE'S PARABLE OF THE VOTER REVISITED, THE MORAL CRISIS

1. PREFACE: THE VOTER, THE RETURNING OFFICER AND THE FUTURE OF AFRICA

Achebe's masterpiece tells the tale of Rufus Okeke, chief campaigner of the candidate of the Peoples Alliance Party, PAP, in their zonal stronghold of Igboland. During this round, Rufus and his entrepreneural ilk can make more money pledging their vote in secret to the futile challenger, from the upstart but well-oiled Peoples Organisation Party, POP. It is an opportunity to maximize the earnings of the season which, the elections having been reduced to a money-making exercise nowadays, is surely one of plenty.

But there is a catch.

Roof is religious, or superstitious if you wish, and there are oaths which mean something to him. His profit-motive cynicism has not yet managed to wipe out his reli-consciousness nor conscience in whole. Should we say he has not completely moved on from the shackles of accountability? The POP trouble-shooter who is his friend other days, has this intelligence and uses it to attempt to ensure Ruff's compliance on the electoral date. Secret blackmail. He has no intention of being cheated that easy as would be the case without some kind of surety. Roof swears the most powerful oath that binds a man to his word, the classic one involving The River Styx I guess. He will betray the party for which he is the chief campaigner and which has been his livelihood –---doesn't matter anyway for the victory is assured in this zone.

But that is easier said than done. Ruff has squables at the moment supreme. It is more precipitated by fear of the consequences of the powerful oath than anything else thinkable or desirable, like keener, inner insight! On the positive side, he has emotionally grown attached to his prestige as the chief campaigner and most trusted aide of the popular candidate. He has appearances to keep, even to himself! Even as he succumbs to greed.

On election day, to serve two masters at the same time, vote two candidates with the same ballot, Rufus comes up with a literal ingenuity which, comical as it is, wipes out the foundations of electoral democracy in Nigeria. The next year there is a coup, two coups in fact. A so-called Igbo coup, and the so-called counter-Igbo coup! ---Enter General Gowon and Chkwuemeka Ojukwu of course!

1966 COUP AND COUNTER COUP

The structure of government under Gowon was basically unitarian. At the apex of government was the all-military Supreme Military Council (SMC), which was the lawmaking body for the entire federation. Its decrees could not be challenged in any law court. Most members of the SMC under Gowon were state governors. There was also a Federal Executive Council composed of military and civilian commissioners. The states also had commissioners appointed by the governor. The states were practically reduced to administrative units of the federal government, which in several domains made uniform laws for the country. This basic structure of military federalism has, with amendments, remained the same during all military governments in the country.

Decrees couldn't be challenged in any law court! –--a permanent injunction! Military rule as a permanent injunction on the rule of the law!! yah?

Enter the civilians then, and yes, I present you more permanent injunctions!

(See Dr. Odili soap!)

Senate moves to upturn Odili’s perpetual injunction

As EFCC seeks reopening of case

By Henry Umoru. November 28, 2016

ABUJA— STRONG indications emerged, weekend, former governor of Rivers State, Dr. Peter Odili, is still a long way from heaving a sigh of relief following plans by both the Senate and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, to reopen investigation into his alleged misappropriation of N100 billion. To actualize this, the Senate has moved to amend the EFCC Act.

It will be recalled that former Governor Peter Odili had secured a perpetual injunction restraining the EFCC from prosecuting or arresting him. Speaking in Port Harcourt, weekend, when he led other committee members on a surprise oversight visit to the South-South regional office of the anti-graft agency, Chairman, Senate Committee on Anti-Corruption and Financial Crimes, Senator Chukwuka Utazi, explained that with the amendment bill of the EFCC Act and when passed, it would upturn the injunction.

www.vanguardngr.com/2016/11/senate-moves-upturn-odilis-perpetual-injunction/

This would reopen investigations into alleged misappropriation of N100 billion by Dr. Odili when he was governor of Rivers State between 1999 and 2007. Senator Utazi, who noted that it was wrong for one arm of government to stop another from performing its constitutional roles, stressed that the amendment would give the anti-graft agency the power to by-pass the injunction. The decision of the Senate committee came up, following a request by the South- regional coordinator of EFCC, Mr. Ishaq Salihu, that the Senate should assist in reopening the investigation and possibly prosecuting Odili.

just to get the parameters in place. At the end of ANIMAL FARM, pig and man appear the same to the Animals. When your Afrian civilian courts offer permanent injunctions on own volition, what is the difference with outright military decrees?

2. IS IT THE KENYAN VOTER, THE RETURNING OFFICER, THE POLITICAL PARTY, THE HUMAN OR COMPUTER ERROR, OR IS IT THE COUNTERS AT THE TALLYING CENTRE?

For there is something rotten at the centre of the Kenyan electoral process! An ominous tale, like Achebe's prophetic humour. It is a tough sum, counting and adding votes up!

continued.

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ACHEBE'S PARABLE THE VOTER COMES TO KENYA (2)

We will get to Kenya Voter Blues alright, but not yet.

First the phrase to EAT SH!t, and enjoy it! –--A quickie from Paolo Pasolini's delve into the abuse of power, chapter fascism.



Okay.





When it comes to the deconstruction of the post-colonial voter in the immediate African setting, the definitive portrait was painted by the grand griot of letters, Chinu Achebe. The short story mocks, satirizes and undercuts the foundation upon which the democratic process is to be based. It was written in 1965, a period of idealism and high hopes but just as shady clouds appear in the path of the newly independent countries. They are pretender independent countries, veiled misformed faces, waiting for the mask of extravagant curtains to be peeled back by some event such as an economic crisis. ('Sudden riches by men who only yesterday walked barefoot in the dusty village tracks; now that they hold political office and in one term of a few years, their homes are sprawled architectural masterpieces upon acres bigger than several primary schools combined!' --That is all fiction of course, art depicting early 60's Nigeria Umuofia! not the fortunes of the MCA near you after DEVOLUTION!) Kenya!

NB: (We could do Wole The Poet Soyinka too, but the man is a thorough mystic, a monk who does not do sex, at least in public! We will come to him when our pleasures of the flesh are indulged senseless! Dangerous Achebe, a lady lecturer told us, is the proverbial wily tongue at the nnnnn, irresistible sensations, or for us men, from her experience, the deep warmth of the deepest throat!)

It is tremendous power in his/her hands, The Voter. To choose who exercises power over the polity and bestow legitimacy upon his acts. Kings chosen by God wont do now, nor will self-appointed and forcefully crowned ones be popular. The Voter is in the eye of a storm. The forces acting on him or her are tectonic Big Bangs. By hook or crook, every social force wants to ingratiate themselves as the Voters True Love, or, failing that, usurp the Voter's voice and becry the voter's loyalty and blessing, somehow. Welcome to Riggingland. Eat your cake and have it still!

The story, short story, is pure poison. It is served with the cynical but divine sophistication of a master chef de souse, a slave serving his revenge cold at those who monopolise his services against his will. It is a near perverted act of lacing his delicacies with his sh!t and urine before offering them with priestly ritualism to the aristocrats at feast, aristocrats who claim their natural superiority over him, the lowly cook. The Voter is an INSPIRED moment of pure clarity. The tongue in cheek, is dipped in pure poison, as if the kisser and the kissed are in a suicide pact. It is a labour of passion, morbid passion. The Visionary Voter.

There is the horrible cheek which reminds of the Italian school of horror art films, but more so, the prophetic and definitive study of Fascism by Paolo Pasolini, SALO, based on Marquis de Sades memoirs, 120 DAYS OF SODOM.



NEXT:



Something quick about Paolo Pasolini's murder, for he was likely murdered for his political inclinations.

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NEXT:

Something quick about Paolo Pasolini's murder, for he was likely murdered for his RED political inclinations.

Who really killed Pier Paolo Pasolini?

A biopic by Abel Ferrara at the Venice biennale will reconstruct the last hours of the Italian film director, who was murdered in 1975

Ed VulliamySunday 24 August 2014

"Want to go for a spin?" the poet and maestro of Italian cinema asked the rent boy, according to the latter's confession to the police. "Come ride with me, and I'll give you a present."
So began the events leading to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, brilliant intellectual, director and homosexual whose political vision – based on a singular entwinement of Eros, Catholicism and Marxism – foresaw Italian history after his death, and the burgeoning of global consumerism. It was a murder that, four decades later, remains shrouded in the kind of mystery and opacity Italy specialises in – un giallo, a black thriller.



The encounter occurred in the miasma of hustling around Roma Termini railway station at 10.30pm on 1 November 1975. And it marks the point of departure for a film tipped to win the Golden Lion at the Venice biennale festival this week – Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe and directed by Abel Ferrara, Bronx-born of Italian descent. The film deals with the last day of an extraordinary life. Ferrara says: "I know who killed Pasolini," but will not give a name. But in an interview with Il Fatto Quotidiano, he adds: "Pasolini is my font of inspiration."

'WW-what aboutttt the BBBig Man?, the alleged assassin of Tom Mboya reputedly asked on his way to the gallows! Damn, it is the same the world over! 'I am just a PATSY', cried Lee Harvey, just moments before being shot in jail!

Pasolini is a devil with images, whether stills or cine.



There is a famous scene of the ultimate power abuse, non physical, when the captives are forced to enjoy a meal of choice fecal matter from their captors.

EAT SH!t ---And they eat sh!t. the camera close-ups of shamelessly munching shit fills with so much disgust even the perverted are unsettled.

Of course the tongues will also clean lick the arzes of the dominators, Mama Mia, there would even be competition in begging to. There is the distinct possibility captives can be so broken they perform their self-degrading acts with stunning, enthusiastic submission. To date, it is a thought this could be the trick within black on black violence in the United States!

NB: (For one, closer to home, think of the way we Kenyans sing and praise and line up whole days to vote for people we know are positively rotten! Or is there subversion is such total submission!? Yes, a dialogue between Muranga and HomaBay might degenerate thus: we know Anne Waiguru is a rot who messed up the NYS, but she is our Queen and will be our Governor, just like you know Raila is a total rigger with his men in blacks et al, but you will still lick his arz to the last piece of sh!t!
Second, Islam is reportedly a religion of Submission, but there is no mistaking the ferocity of some of its militant sects against their defined enemies! There is terrible violence submerged in submission! Yes, colonial pacification was training the native in eating his alleged superior's sh!t of free will! There is terrible energy in bondage. Managing its release is the political skill of a millennia!)

The SALO artistic depiction was just plainly banned for decades. In any case the film stayed disturbingly macabre; and some say the motive for Pasolini's murder.



Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Haffez Assads Taldmoor prison of horrors, Auschwitz, what is new? Once you have seen SALO and thought about us, humans in unchecked power, there is nowhere for your mind to hide. We are all eating sh!t in the refuse belt of Democracy. That is why I started with the image of human scavengers competing birds upon the garbage heaps of urban Kenya. And the public administrators some of the best paid in the world. Kenyans, aren't we well trained! don't we cherish eating sh!t! I dare say, track events and athletics apart, we are a most competitive case of dung eaters! It needs some keen insight why!

Eat sh!t, O fellow Kenyan! compete the ravens, you are a perfect scavenger!



THE VOTER, THE RETURNING OFFICER AND THE FUTURE OF KENYA

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THE BANDITS MONOPOLISE THE APEX, HOLD THE PRESIDENCY CAPTIVE

DISCLAIMER:

For the purposes of this thread, I wish to operate from the premise, that, for the foreseeable future, The Kenyan Presidency is held captive by the bandit bourgeoisie. TheY will football it amongst themselves, exclusively passing it around and on like it were some fetish object and heirloom. Fiercely they will growl at any outsider nearing by, and ruthlessly shall they abuse power to maintain power, and use the state to further privately accumulate.

Well, the state is esily a class heirloom! it takes a social upheaval the rank of a revolution to change that! and it is definitely an object of fetish, coveted by by all social formations ---and Tom Dicks and Harry's!

There is the dissatisfaction with nominations which has led to the rise of independents, or would be independents, but their dissent is much more the expression of personal grief than any programmatic alternative. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is a vague pointer to systemic malfunction, though it is less important than the borrowing spree to pay off matured loans and service new ones which Henry Rotich, the cabinet secretary for finance, has already been relegated to.

The famous macro-economist is busy digging a debt-hole from which ever more slices of the national cake has to be cut and thrown to the monsters, aka creditors. It is a race to the bottom, and to the bone, cursing future generations with inherited debt and guilt! –----This pointer to a systematic, financial malfunction is the real story of the bandit bourgeoisie rule, or misrule. It is their Achilles heel, and the seeds of a Greek tragedy.

But the drama has a long build up. Meanwhile the popular bandits fly their pirate flag, run their buccaneering state. It is party time in the bandit Fiefdom. Howbeit I will merry along too –---that is gladly accept that 300% increment CBA negotiated by KNUT/KUPPET! And so too advise the doctors to merry along after their debt-funded historic settlement, not to mention the minimum wagers who received some small bone from the buccaneer's table, to make meaning of May Day One.

I am being happy and not worrying too much! Things can be worse you know! Thinking of Greece today, under forced austerity! Too mentally imploded to consider independence!

NB: Independence can be overrated. The British establishment is currently scared sh!tless, forced by their people to get out of the EU!