By: Patrice S Rawlins
Politics and power are very funny things!
So once again the season has come when the will of the people will play right at the centre of national politics, as the pontificating hand upon the heads of those who shall captain the national ship.
Elections come upon us at a time when the citizenry continue to brave the crackling whips of a monster-economy that has aggressively eroded their purchasing power, and thrown many to the cold of the streets.
This is just about time when we begin to see the elite politician descending from the heights of his ivory tower down to meet with those that have for the past years been relegated to the fringes.
A collective hungry mass, beaten down to the skin by the depredations of corruption as small men with long shadows elbowed them out from the vicinity of the national cake with such brute force.
Could Lenin have been wrong in his utterance that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament?
Within the washbasin of the treacherous waters of politics, the power of the poor has both been over and under-estimated, emphasized the most by those with ulterior motives and down-played by the gluttons of power.
Somewhere along the way, the mass has been surviving on a borrowed sense of inclusivity.
In the pangs of our pain, we have continued to allow those that have created these ills to be the ones to hold monopoly over solutions.
A people banded together by the marching battalions of hunger need much longer spoons when supping with the devil, and should have every right to read between the lines and lies when the same devil comes for dinner wearing Prada.
The conversation of a politician whose battery life has timed out, is as worse as the pleadings of a predator caught by a hunter’s trap, especially so when such conversation is between him and the mass.
Freedom and stability has been the political trump card of the elite which has created a breeding ground for sanitized capital theft in the higher echelons of power.
Lenin, at this juncture, reminds us beyond the grave that no amount of political freedom will satisfy a hungry mass.
If the rich propertied class is brought together by its material gain, then the poor mass ought to be united by the mere force of poverty.
The need for an alternative political solution to socio-economic woes has at every turn been frustrated by the voter that casts his vote blinded by the blinkers of hollow propaganda and suicidal partisan loyalty.
And so our misguided will, blind to the urgency of reform, continue to be manipulated to legitimate fraudsters and charlatans.
The silence into which we cower create enough peace and stability for any investor to come strike anti-socialist deals with the elite.
Such investments have created bubbles that have burst right in our bayonetted faces, and a veneer of wealth enough to attract an upper middle income tag that is entirely false.
And so when the politician in borrowed up-class suites come to dine, it is about time we pin him against the wall on past broken promises.
It is the opportune moment to transform our poverty into a creative force, one to turn the tables right in the face of the neo-oppressor for a dispensation of disruptive progress.
The fear of state-reprisal needs to be energized by the fear of more years to come holed in the gut-rot of our own demise, the demise of dignity and honor.
The urgency of reform is stuck somewhere between the tired legs of the heroes of the past, and this has been and will always be the albatross lined about our necks.
The mass is no more a statistic.
