By Vitalis Ruvando
THIS article zooms hunhu/ubuntu lens on global north electoral imperatives, while other narratives may magnify hunhu/ubuntu goggles on modern African electoral practices.
Without doubt there is growing importance of knowledge and innovation in every human endeavor.
As a people, as Africans, all our activities are governed or should be governed by the concept of ubuntu/hunhu while in Islamic Africa it resembles umma.
“Where is the spirit of ubuntu?” Julius Malema probed South Africans.
Without doubt ubuntu matrices are poor, harassed but still alive in churches, cities and universities and full of promise in rural areas.
According to the World Bank, 51,76 percent of Africans live in rural areas.
There are seven types of innovations. Sustainable innovation aims at “…meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations to meet their own.” (UNWCED, 2012)
A month after national elections in the 43th year of Zimbabwe’s independence, the need arises to design and implement sustainable innovation practices for the development of hunhu/ubuntu electoral heritages.
Scholars opine that today, Africa appears like a battlefield pitting closed (proprietary) innovation practices for the growth of Western electoral heritages against sustainable innovation practices for the development of hunhu/ubuntu electoral heritages.
As if playing a game of chess, ‘advancing’ Western electoral practices are accounting for hunhu/ubuntu electoral ponies and calling ineffective open-checks before and after national elections.
In response, retreating hunhu/ubuntu electoral practices are accounting for Western electoral horses, bishops, castles and the Queen, calling checkmate in the ballot box across Africa, save for isolated countries.
In this narrative, hunhu/ubuntu is abridged to mean unity in diversity or of purpose that facilitates processes of informing, dictating and actualising the spirit of humanness, communality, reciprocity, co-responsibility, psychosomatic justice, morality, solidarity, compassion, conviviality and conciliation.
The assumption is that closed innovation practices for the development of Western electoral catalogues, in their secular substance, process and form philosophy are strategies for regime change that instigate electoral violence, fraud or litigating electoral heritages of African origin.
Modern Africa must design and implement sustainable innovation practices for the growth of hunhu/ubuntu electoral values that are inspiring liberation struggles across Africa and foster Afro-voters’ anti-West stance during national elections.
Lest we forget, the indigenes’ right to vote underscores Afro-identity, unity, dignity and is the first mover to liberation struggles across Africa.
Hunhu/ubuntu’s electoral taxonomies are written in the compassionate heart or conscience
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of indigenes.
One Fr Cocks once remarked: “They are classifications of indigenes’ ideational cultures that must be jealously guarded by Afro-voters enlightened by Afro-cosmogonic spirits.”
Post-independence Africa cannot claim to have granted beneficial participation to Afro-voters; perhaps modern Africa has aborted hunhu/ubuntu electoral heritages.
“By choice or design, veterans of the struggles appear to have dwarfed, blinded or muted the need to domesticate global north electoral frames using hunhu/ubuntu electoral heritages in post-independence electoral innovations,” remarked Ingwe Idowu of Yoruba City, Nigeria.
One wonders if modern African electoral laws are not ‘cut and paste’, plagiarism or snares of global north jurisprudential hermeneutics that encourage jarring catcalls than preferential option for hunhu/ubuntu electoral taxonomies.
Consequently, feats of righteous indignation tender the use of Afrocentric counter repression, negative hermeneutics and advocacy methods to amplify the preeminence of ubuntu electoral edges in evolving Afro-electoral practices.
By and large, emotional and naturalistic intelligence in hunhu/ubuntu electoral drives foster matters of the compassionate heart that despises colonial or missionary thrifts but nurtures humanness, conviviality, solidarity and conciliation among indigenes.
Closed innovation practices for the development of Western electoral drives are informed by a hierarchy of needs dictated by a protestant ethic and motivates colonialism, capitalism and ‘globalisation’.
The same seem to foster Western electoral hegemony by providing funds to instigate election violence, fraud, litigations and post-election mediocracies in African States.
As such, hybridising sustainable innovation practices for the development of hunhu/ubuntu electoral thrifts can comprehensively model evolving African electoral reforms.
Research studies across Africa convince that the convergence point of hunhu/ubuntu golden norm and psychosomatic justice is the cog of hunhu/ubuntu electoral taxonomy.
In short, hunhu/ubuntu values serve purposes of facilitating processes of protecting ubuntuland and African parliaments need to promulgate laws for sustainable innovation practices for hunhu/ubuntu development.
