The secretary wanted to know the secret of the great man’s successful speechmaking, but the great man always wrote his own speeches by hand and did not ask the secretary to make copies.
One day, the secretary came into the great man’s office and found it empty. “This is my chance,” he thought “I must see some of the notes for his speeches.” He tried the desk drawers and found the first one unlocked. He opened the drawer and – there were several handwritten speeches. He picked up the first one and read it eagerly. It was simply the text of the speech, with some notes in the margins. The secretary turned his attention to these. Surely here were the secrets of making a successful speech. None of the notes seemed special until he found one that said: Weak point here: SHOUT
How true that is! The guy who shouts, unless he thinks you are deaf, is trying to silence his own doubts about what he is saying. It may be more than doubts. It might be an insistent little voice inside him that says “You know this is a load of rubbish”. The more he doubts or questions himself, the louder he shouts – unless he eventually decides to listen to that inner voice.
If, on the other hand, he keeps trying to silence inconvenient truths that he can’t deny, he may go beyond shouting and start hitting people. That’s not the way to persuade anyone. The most he can expect is that they might say, out of fear, that they agree with him – as long as he stands over them with a big stick in his hand.
When they’re beating people up this long before an election, that means they are really running scared. They’ve got serious doubts about whether they can get any votes at all. They need to have some to multiply when they start rigging the count. And they know they can’t find so many people to use big sticks and nastier weapons for them.
Everybody’s getting tired of that game, and even the youth are getting smarter. They all remember that promises made to the thugs didn’t mean much. There was a time when they would give you a plot – after they had looted Agritex down to the last motorbike tyre, so you had no-one to advise you on the problems new farmers always face. And if you did succeed, some chef took the plot from you. So they had less and less to give. Who will kill for a few scuds or a handful of mbanje? They could only tell stories about imaginary threats. By now, who would fight their neighbours to defend themselves against Tony Blair and all those dead Rhodesian generals someone told us were coming back?
No wonder they make so much noise.
No wonder it sounds so hollow.
Post published in: Opinions