The social contract: A painful joke.

“A politician is like your maid! You tell them what to do and when you’re not happy with them anymore, you fire them!”

After she had said this, the whole room broke into a bout of laughter and l chuckled. Despite the room having been one filled with responsible citizens that always took it upon themselves to attend bill hearings and ward meetings and hold their duty bearers to account, they found the above statement to be very funny. My mind immediately ran to my history lessons in High school on French history where we had learnt about Rousseau and his famous Social contract. In his theory he says that citizens of a country and their leaders have an agreement between them, the citizens elect them to positions of power and in return these leaders work to better the lives of those same people that voted for them. He goes further to say, loosely that if the leaders fail to do what is expected of them, the citizens have the power to break the agreement and remove them from their positions of authority. If you live anywhere in Africa this is very interesting to think about because more often than not nothing of this sort happens, it is never that simply really. Political leaders often become gods and not servants so it will be clear why the people in that room found this bold statement quite humorous. Her statement wasn’t the status qou, in fact it hasn’t been the status qou in over four decades!

Here in Zimbabwe where we live, politicians are very seasonal, they appear towards elections where they promise to build spaghetti roads and create five million jobs and then disappear after being elected. Only to appear in the next elections promising to solve every problem under the sun, problems that their absence in mind and actions have caused.They let debt and corruption spiral when they are in office only to come back and claim that they can solve these problems in one hundred days, if only we vote for them. We, the citizens are completely knocked off our feet by the gold and diamonds they keep dangling in front of our eyes that we forget their numerous sins in an instant. You should see us then, chanting slogans while our mothers and aunties twerk without a care in the world and we declare our undying love and support for them. We tell them we will die and kill for them, the crowd roars with excitement and the truth is we mean it. If their utopian promises can’t do the trick, our politicians have weapons of mass destruction to force us into submission. In my beloved Zimbabwe, no one wants to recall the campaign of violence that had the Human Rights Watch report close two 2,000 incidents of torture and violence.Those are our maids and garden boys they went to school to only be educated in the theory of the stick and the carrot. They practice it religiously because they know that where the carrot cannot be used, the stick will do the job.

Despite smiling at her bold statement, l did so painfully. I wanted to believe her and l knew everyone in that room wanted to believe her too. We wanted our president to willingly attend a commission of enquiry and answer questions put to them with zeal as other nations had shown us was possible. We wanted the power that other citizens elsewhere had where they could force a Prime Minister to resign because he lied about attending a party when the rest of the nation was under Covid-19 regulations. We wanted such transparency and accountability from our leaders, we are human enough to deserve those rights. This train of thought led me to start questioning how we as a country could ever get there or else we would be stuck with politicians that were more concerned about getting more cars for themselves than water for their citizens.

I knew we needed to be more “woke”, not just in hashtags about celebrities who couldn’t care less if we starved to death but with the governance of our communities. I knew too that the old philosophy of telling anyone who dared complain about dire conditions to join politics didn’t fully work. Asking every capable person to be a politician does not work. It is true that we need more honest and capable citizens as our political leaders but they can’t all be politicians. Don’t otherinstitutions such as the medical and teaching fields needpeople with integrity?

However, whilst we all cannot be politicians, we certainly can all be more politically conscious. We can learn to think carefully about who we are voting for and if they actually deserve it. We can all learn to question parliamentarians about CDF’s and our debt status, we can all really learn to demand we be treated as we are, humans.

But, what do l know? I’m just a twenty two year old whose grown frustrated with a country where thievery seems to be the only thing that pays.