Month: November 2010

Election Day

Election Day

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Democracy may not be cracked up to be what we think. Neither here or … in Tanzania.

As I look at what has happened in East African elections over the last several years – all considered democratic – and place that in the background of our own elections, today, I wonder if implementing the “will of the people” (WoP) can ever occur.

In Tanzania there is every indication that the ruling elite will continue to rule, as they have for … well, forever. Ditto for Rwanda earlier this year, and what we also expect in Uganda. Only in Kenya, where the electorate is more educated and empowered, have elections been close enough to cause real trouble.

The Tanzanian election was Sunday, and the political party whose heritage comes from the one-party state that took Tanzania from independence in 1962 to its first multi-party election in 1992 is expected to win handily. Results are seeping out and should be known in full by the end of the week.

That first “democratic” election in 1992 was forced on Tanzanian society, mainly by an unrelenting Reagan policy that stopped any kind of donor aid from virtually any US or world aid organization if the country didn’t go “democratic.”

Reagan created the diplomat known as the “Democracy Officer” and put one in virtually every embassy and consulate in the world. Sort of like a politburo official, this puny little usually poorly trained non career diplomat had effectively more power in some embassies – particularly in East Africa – than the ambassador him/herself.

Tanzania – like many developing countries around the world – was clever. They created a veneer of multi-party democracy that even to today is hardly more. Political parties are denied registration. Opposition candidates get no press. And like many of our own T-party candidates this year at home, central party candidates refused to debate or talk to the press.

Is this “democratic”?

In Rwanda presidential opponents are dead or in jail. Uganda holds an election, soon. The opponents have quietly withdrawn or are in what is locally called the “process of disappearing.”

Yet our State Department, the EU and other lordly world bodies, have called these all “democratic elections.”

I suppose they are. And perhaps, that’s the point. To the extent that people can vote, if that’s all democracy means, they are voting with their daily lives of complacency as much as at the ballot box, that they will do as they are being told to do.

Is that “democracy”?

And here at home, it could be that a majority of Americans today vote against their own best interests. Because they’ve been fed simple lies they believe. Like Obama is a Muslim. Or that death panels will decide their death moment.

Or that the Health Care Law is so many bad things it isn’t and none of the good things it is. Or that Obama is responsible for the debt. Or that the wars …

The wars? Anyone talking about the wars? Are there wars? Anybody hear a bomb recently? Are Afghans and Iraqis and American kids being blown to smithereens?

Anyone care? Maybe it’s just in xBox.

What we’re learning here and in Africa is that democracy does not reflect WoP. It reflects a physical act of choosing between candidates, but the little brain that directs those hands marking a ballot and effecting a choice is … well, brainwashed.

Democracy seems to be doing what you can be convinced to do. Even if it’s not true, or not what you really want to do.

That’s not what democracy should mean.

To me democracy means affecting a choice whose outcome you understand pretty clearly and correctly. There really is a reality out there, Joe. If the pipes are clogged, there really is a place – probably in the U-tube – where sludge is building. And we probably can really plunge it out.

But if you’re told over and over that it’s OK your sink overflows, that the pipes are still working, then Joe the Plumber & Great Deceiver controls your life, not you.

Only in Kenya has democracy approached some realistic manifestation of WoP. And that provoked the worst election violence we’ve seen in Africa in my life time. Is that good? Certainly not for the 1300 murdered and 150,000 displaced.

So, WoP, are you everything you’re cracked up to be?

Have we restored Sanity?

Have we restored Sanity?

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

Jim Heck (left) with Chicago lawyer Bill Sullivan
in the White House press room after the rally.
As 1 in 200,000+ attendees at John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, Saturday, I was wildly enthusiastic about the whole program until the end.

I might only be .000005 th of the voice of the mass, but I think I reflected most of humanity which had encased me. Stewart’s ending soliloquy on too much negativism and polarization ran hugely hollow.

Almost everyone there, like me, was a progressive. The cast of characters that marched onto the stage, from Cat Stevens (now Jusef) to Father Gaducci were liberal cut-outs of a very long and historic left-wing movement in this country.

The great skits depicting the wrongness of generalizing about religious fanaticism, of exaggerating the coming of the apocalypse and the reactionary views of most of the “mainstream” media, were all great and enlightening.

And the police helicopters circling endlessly above and the Batman-like snipers on the building tops made us all realize this wasn’t all fun and games.

So Stewart’s attempt to accentuate neutrality, compromise and thereby bring back a feel-good America drew about as much applause as Father Gaducci when he called for God to give us a sign that Methodism was the true religion.

There was more polite laughter.

But that was hardly ten minutes of five hours. The rest was great. We progressives came in thousands and thousands and we weren’t shrill or ridiculous (like the Beck crowd), and there was a lot of humor, something I believe progressives have always maintained. And a real indication that our beliefs are constructed not divined from the supernatural.

One of my favorite signs was, “Give me ambivalence, or give me something else.”

I think we were a great sea of wait-and-see. Our enthusiasm was really for sanity, something currently missing from American life. Anyone who wants to tap into us has to start speaking in grammatically correct sentences that can easily be fact-checked!

And how will we vote?

Democratic.

But will we all vote?

Not sure. It just might be better to let the crazies duke it out first.

Tanzania Elects After America Votes

Tanzania Elects After America Votes

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

We will know the official outcome of our elections Tuesday, before we know the official outcome of Tanzania’s Sunday elections.

Despite the rapid development in places like Tanzania, there are still many very remote polling stations, and uniformity in how returns are reported publicly rules Tanzanian law. So of course they know right now who won in the urban areas like Dar, but it won’t be reported until little remote villages like Endulen report in as well.

The expected results are much more expected in Tanzania than here at home.

Jakaya Kikwete, the current president, will likely be reelected for his second and final term, although by a much narrower margin than the 80% of his first election.

Kikwete has lost some of his pizzaz. A few weeks after his first election, he dressed up like a commoner and walked into various government agencies, like social security, and experienced the distress of trying to get something done.

He’d walk out and the next day fire most of the staff.

He was hailed for such bravado. But those days are far gone. His main rival, Willibrod Slaa, is riding a wave of anti-corruption sentiment. Foreign donors have halved their donations since Kikwete’s first election, ostensibly because of growing corruption.

This half billion dollars lost annually, in a national budget which is only just over $6 billion, is a sizeable hit. Kikwete has tried some fancy footwork to close the gaps, including increasing the tax on foreign mining companies and issuing bonds, but it still falls massively short.

So the country has moved into deficit spending big time, even while the economy is doing nicely and would not normally mandate such red ink if the donors were being normally kind.

Like here at home, it’s the economy stupid, and in a developing country even when the economy is doing pretty well, for many it seems exactly otherwise. It will be a generation before the developing world can provide to the extent the developed world now does.

And as communication increases and democracy spreads, discontent rules.

Change, whether you can believe in it or not, motivates everyone’s vote.