Mfonobong Inyang: Why Turkeys Never Vote For Thanksgiving

Trust me, this is not about turkeys. But, assuming turkeys can talk, if you ask a turkey to vote for Thanksgiving, it will roll its eyes and ram a sounding hiss to your ears. Whilst Thanksgiving is a feast for you, it’s a funeral for turkeys. Yet, they have no choice when we take them out to be slaughtered for Thanksgiving.

The situation of turkeys can be likened to our voting system. Just as turkeys have no way to choose if they want to be slaughtered for Thanksgiving or not even though what causes you to celebrate also represents their death, it is the same way it is not in some people’s interest to vote for good governance because it represents the death of their loyalty to a party or their personality.

Here’s some reasons why people vote for a person instead of good governance.

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Sincere Ignorance

Many voters honestly don’t know any better; they fall too easy for cleverly-curated lies that are repackaged and regurgitated every election cycle. The sheer political illiteracy of this is the joy of incompetent aspirants because they are able to sway the undiscerning to look past their egregious and inept leadership. The inability of this group of voters to interrogate political choices is a huge problem; they seemingly find it hard to draw a line between bad leadership and abysmal socio-economic outcomes. The effect of herding also comes into play because they have largely outsourced their thinking from others and are unable to go against the grain of their communities.

Identity Politics/Groupthink Sentiments

Identity politics is an approach that encourages or uses groupthink sentiments such as partisanship, religion, gender, social class, ethnicity as a fundamental basis for taking certain decisions such as voting. The idea is that the power of bloc votes can be harnessed for political gains, especially where the demography appears dominant. This is usually practised in heterogeneous societies where sensibilities are heightened and people decide along the lines of their biases instead of proven competence.

Men In Grey Suits

Of course, this has nothing to do with my gender or corporate outfits of a particular colour. It’s an idiomatic expression that underscores the fact that the biggest power players in most circles are very opaque and surreptitious about how they influence outcomes. Understand that not everyone is interested in becoming the face on a ballot, they prefer to stay in the shadows and empower a figurehead to run for public office. This is why some of us were raising an alarm about clandestine groups purchasing party nomination forms for most candidates. A person can’t be funded by the devil as a candidate and think that he or she will make good on the campaign promise of casting out demons when in office.

When in power, such public office holders will pander to these interests at the expense of the general public because it’s a patronage system and ‘loyalty’ forbids that such candidates bite the hands that fed them. So if you’re not careful, you might think you’re voting for a person but you’re really voting for a puppet whose strings will be controlled by those who must not be named.

So many people are willing to support a candidate they wouldn’t hire for their own private businesses for public offices just because of certain things they gain or stand to gain. They will sell an incompetent candidate to their own people just because of personal interests. The intellectual dishonesty and cognitive dissonance such people manifest is not a bug, it’s a feature. Most of them know what they are doing but are more than willing to sacrifice the collective peace, progress and development of a country for their personal ambitions. Oppressors know this, that’s why they usually send your own to you as envoys. God help you if you’re blinded by pedestrian motivations, you may pay a steep price in the future for your naivety or greed.

Friend Or Foe?

Thanks to the type of work I do, I am exposed to a lot of information by default. I have since learnt how to walk and chew gum at the same time. I can appreciate the excellence of a country’s culture whilst also grasping the cold realities of their foreign policies and pursuit of strategic interests. Many external interests are usually at play during elections especially on this side of the Atlantic. One bloc predominantly uses the economy as its preferred mode of influence whilst the other bloc predominantly meddles in the political equation. So if it’s in their global interests to undermine another country, one thing they can do is use their machinery to push for an incompetent leader to assume power. Especially in developing countries where institutions aren’t so strong, these foisted individuals can run such geo-political entities aground within a short time.

It’s nothing personal; forget the nice photo-ops, megaphone diplomacy, performative sanctions and intermittent “strongly-worded statements” – if their agenda requires them to stand back and stand by, they will play the unlooking game without shifting an eyelid. This is why I keep saying that no messiah is coming to save you, know this and know peace. If they come to your aid, it’s not because they have suddenly become altruistic or that you’re the best thing since sliced bread. It’s because it simply aligns with their interests to intervene. I’m trusting that as you become more interested in international relations, you will see how quickly the goalpost can be shifted when the rubber hits the road.