UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLICATED MINDSET OF A RURAL VOTER
Rural voters are often misunderstood to be of low intellect, that they fail to reason and that a simple chitenge will win them over.
But that is not the case, rural voters actually have very high intellect, and they do reason like everyone else.
However, they are trapped in a permanent cycle of poverty that forces them to vote a certain way, against their own wishes.
For rural voters, the immediate hunger situation requires immediate relief, in the form of short term relief benefits, and the PF has come to master this game, where poverty is used and exploited to extract political benefits from rural voters.
1: The PF uses the DMMU as a political tool, they will distribute some mealie meal to villagers before the election and tell them that they will receive the balance only after the PF wins the election. This forces the villagers to vote for PF because they are in dire need of the food.
2: The PF abuses the social cash transfer programme by telling rural voters that only those areas who vote for PF will receive it.
The rural voter in Western Province knows that if they vote for the opposition right now, they will not receive their social cash transfer benefit, they are therefore left with no choice but to vote for PF in a by election.
The rural voter knows that voting for the opposition in a ward election will give them no financial or material benefits because the republican President is still PF.
3: The PF uses agricultural inputs as a weapon, rural voters are told that if they don’t vote for PF, they will not receive seed and fertilizer. We are now going into the farming season and these rural voters know that if they don’t vote PF, they will not receive inputs. They are then forced to vote for PF.
To summarize it, it’s generally blackmail. The PF blackmails rural voters into voting for it in by elections, they use poverty and hunger as a tool to extract political benefits.
We need to understand that there’s two economies in Zambia, the urban economy and the rural economy and the needs of voters in these two economies are different.
The rural economy is highly dependent on government handouts, which means the party in power at any given time has an edge because it controls the resources.
The urban economy is different, people don’t receive handouts from government, they rely on good government policy to create a conducive economic environment where people work for themselves.
That’s why when a government fails, like the PF, they first lose support in the urban areas before the wind of change sweeps through the rural areas.
But the PF must not underestimate the intelligence of a rural voter.
Rural voters always vote for the ruling party in by elections to extract short term benefits, but when it comes to general elections with the Presidency at stake, these voters always vote their mind.
Ask MMD and RB, they used to win all by elections in Western province in the run up to 2011, but when the general election came Michael Sata even won areas like Mongu and Nalolo, once deemed impossible.
Copyright NDC MEDIA 03.08.2020