Right to vote revoked !
I discovered yesterday that, despite being raised in Zimbabwe, schooled in Zimbabwe, and employed in Zimbabwe, my right to vote in my country has been revoked. I might add that this has happened without any consideration of the fact that my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc are all Zimbabwean born and bred. Why does this apply to me? Because my parents, bless them, just happened to be in South Africa when I was born. And that small teeny-weeny fact sets me apart from generations of my family and fellow Zimbabweans.
I possibly sound far too nonchalant about this. After all, millions of people around the world have died for their right to vote and I may sound as if I don’t really care.
The truth is, my vote - which I have always exercised on principle - has for a long time felt like an empty gesture and increasingly so since March 2005. Sure, I’ve always made sure that my carefully executed ‘X’ appeared in the correct box, but I’ve never really believed it had the value it’s meant to have.
Stalin is frequently cited as saying “It’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.” To expect me to believe that my vote had meaning is to expect me to believe that the current regime - the counters in the counting house - is credible, fair and honest. Sorry, that just doesn’t compute.
I shall miss my vote though; it wasn’t totally worthless. It’s real value lay in my sense that standing there, carefully crossing my two lines in that particular box, was effectively forking up two fingers to zanu-pf’s face - and that’s a really good feeling. Better than therapy.
But there are other ways to pull two fingers, and I’m flexing my indices as I type.
