There’s a traditional village entertainment that’s played in rural areas of Canada, usually on holidays and market days, whenever enough people gather.
The game is a countryside version of a lottery. This is how it works. An empty room of appropriate size is selected, usually in one of the village outhouses. Competitors write their names on small pieces of paper, which are then laid randomly on the floor of the room. For each piece of paper placed on the floor of the room a small entrance fee is charged.
When all the pieces of paper are in place everyone withdraws from the room and the ‘draw” begins. A live chicken is introduced into the room and allowed to wander around aimlessly, as chickens like to do. The competitors crowd around the windows and peer in.
The chicken strolls here and there, clucking thoughtfully, occasionally scratching at the pieces of paper, pecking at them. Sooner or later the chicken will do something else chickens always do, which is to stop, concentrate for a moment, fluff up its feathers and then have a quick shit. And there you have it. If the product falls on the piece of paper with your name on it, you win the total entrance fee — which you are expected to, but don’t necessarily have to, donate to something worthy. If the chicken should happen to lay an egg on your bit of paper you have to buy everyone present a drink: a sort of ‘hole-out-one”.
Uncomplicated bucolic fun, allowing that there occur occasions when a ‘difficult” chicken deliberately deposits in between the pieces of paper, or has a sudden case of stage-fright with accompanying ‘frozen colon syndrome” and refuses to defecate at all or, as happened once in the district of New Jameson, actually had a heart attack from all the stress.
The other day they were discussing the South African electoral Act on the radio and it struck me that a chicken-turd polling method might be a far better way of electing our politicians than the one currently in use.
The way things work now is that, come the democratic occasion, a trusting South African electorate has only the option to vote for a party; the people have no say whatsoever as to which actual members of that party end up misrepresenting them in central Parliament or in its numerous provincial-cousin forums. Those decisions are left to the leaders of the competing parties to decide. In other words the party leaders have the final and critical say.
They call this electoral method by a fine-sounding name, ‘proportional representation”, in order to cover up the fact that it’s actually a bag of extremely smelly political bones that has far less to do with the practical implementation of democratic ideals than it has with keeping one’s party cronies safely in the driving seats of all those tasteful Mercedes and Pajeros. Saddam Hussein is known to have used more or less the same sort of system in which he also played the part of the chicken. Those he didn’t choose he had ground up into feed.
Why can’t we institute some sort of chicken-turd method of choosing our politicians? Let local communities compile lists of suitable candidates, men and women who have shown themselves to be contributing and honest members of their communities, people who mean what they say, don’t talk in riddles, keep promises, are willing to work hard — in other words the diametric opposite of the average sitting South African politician.
Once the community finalises its list of candidates all it has to do is find a large room somewhere and let an entirely independent chicken decide who from among these true worthies moves up to Wabenzi status. This would be a reliable means of getting a far more representative class of hoods, liars and grand larcenists into power than by letting the party boss choose them from some centrally diddled array of apparatchiks who have sworn unquestioning devotion to him in return for their inclusion on the list.
You only have to look at Manto Tshabalala-Msimang — or ‘MTM Goodbye the Future” as she’s affectionately known down at the Treatment Action Campaign — to see how faithfully she has developed and fine-tuned the Mbeki prejudices on HIV/Aids. Manto was very high on the proportional representation list, even if she had to wait until Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma had finished battering the health department into Sarafina-sized pieces. Clearly the current electoral system sucks — both ways at the same time. The sooner we get shot of it and move to the chicken-turd method the better.
I own five healthy and productive laying hens, notwithstanding a quite repulsive goitre one has developed on her neck. If the floor of their loafing yard is anything to go by they all have well developed political sagacity. Feeding them the other day, I wondered would these gentle souls have chosen a better minister of health than Thabo did? They certainly couldn’t have done much worse.
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