The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the hands of a Serb nationalist in 1914, triggering the First World War, has been called ‘the shot heard round the world’. By almost the same token, one can say that in the past fortnight the global digital sphere experienced what might be called ‘the shock felt round the world’. That was when a Zimbabwean comedian decided to explain the meaning of the chant that kicks off the 1994 film, The Lion King.

I guess many readers will remember the opening scene in this most loved of all animated films, showing the animals moving in unison towards what we later learn is Pride Rock to celebrate the birth of the son of the king of the jungle. Comic Learnmore Jonasi decided to enlighten his Nigerian interlocutors of the podcast he appeared in that the Zulu words, “Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba/Sithi uhm ingonyama”, mean nothing more than the prosaic, “Look, there’s a lion. Oh, my god!”

Jonasi was met with incredulity by one of his hosts, who echoed many of us when he said he had assumed that the words signified something far more uplifting. That disappointment was reflected across the social media world. As it turned out, Jonasi had merely a passing acquaintance with the Zulu language, and what he had declaimed with so much authority and in a southern African accent to boot was a literal translation. Since the Zulu retain their traditional monarchy and thus would have the language to describe royals and their doings, the words do have a majestic provenance and can be variously translated, including as, “Look, father, here is his majesty/I say, it’s a king.”

All does not seem lost after all.

Fresh mandate

Enough of the fictional world and a return to reality and our own royalty, or rather, ex-royalty. The post-election commentary in general has focused on the rise of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) and the impending investiture of Balendra Shah as Nepal’s prime minister while noting the near-total decimation of the older parties. That included the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), the political vehicle that was supposed to deliver the royal sceptre back into the hands of the former king. It must have stung the ex-king even more since the electoral results came just some days after hordes of royalists welcomed him back to Kathmandu, albeit in a contrived setting. As it turned out, only his namesake, Gyanendra Shahi of Jumla, was able to rise to the occasion and save the RPP the embarrassment of a complete rout.

Here, I would beg to differ with a section of the commentariat that the people yet again rejected the monarchy. It was not so much the king the people did not care about but rather that in the RSP, they found something they could dare to believe in. Nepalis want delivery, and they do not really care if that comes from Balendra Shah or Gyanendra Shah. Given his and his family’s record, the former king and his minions would be quite hard-pressed to sell the monarchy as an agent of change. Hence, the RSP wave.

Nepotism endures

I had no intention of voting for the RSP and did not. What infuriated me during the election campaign, though, was the insinuation by some in the older parties that the likes of Balendra Shah and Rabi Lamichhane, the RSP president, have no business trying to run the country. Not when these youngsters had contributed zilch to creating the conditions for their ability to politick, and especially not when the veterans who had are still politically active. As if the whole purpose of the decades-long struggles by the latter—in the name of the people, mind you—had been to appropriate power for and among themselves—forever.

What these oldies and their apologists tend to forget is that nearly all of them have been thanked by the people and rewarded in full measure, time and time again. It is simply because they always managed to make a complete hash of the trust placed in their very incapable hands that we saw the rise, first of Balendra Shah and the former mayor of Dharan, Harka Sampang, and of parties like the RSP and Sampang’s outfit.

Given this context, what transpired recently is mind-boggling. Within days of receiving fulsome praise and appreciation from a grateful nation for the peaceful conduct of the elections and even being touted as a future president, Prime Minister Sushila Karki made a serious lapse in judgment. As a farewell gift to her private secretary, Adarsha Kumar Shrestha, she appointed him to a plum five-year posting as chair of the Nepal Trust for Nature Conservation.

In an interview published the same day, Karki had expressed her deep gratitude to Shrestha, crediting him with almost single-handedly helping her navigate her prime ministership. That could very well be true. But that is between the two of them, not reason enough for foisting on us someone controversial as well as thoroughly ill-qualified to lead the country’s premier conservation agency. Certainly, Shrestha would not be the first such misfit at the Trust, but have we forgotten in six short months that the trigger for the Gen Z movement was nepotism of this very sort? Despite the public outcry, Karki has remained steadfast even as Shrestha has managed to tarnish his patron’s reputation through the self-serving deal he was able to wrangle from her.

What has not generally been commented on is the concurrent government decision to push for Home Minister Om Prakash Aryal’s induction into the National Assembly. It beats me that the cabinet—which included Aryal himself—should make such a recommendation when an elected government is within days of taking office. It would have been far more in keeping with the spirit of the times if Aryal’s name had been suggested by the incoming government in recognition of his yeoman services to the country, both prior to and after the Gen Z movement. Old habits do die hard.

What goes around comes around

One of the commitments made by the RSP in its election manifesto is amending the constitution to ensure the parliament is elected through a fully Proportional Representative (PR) system. That was then, but with its spectacular success in the first-past-the-post (FPTP) part of the election, one wonders if there are second thoughts floating. After all, they did win 76 percent of the FPTP seats but their tally in the PR was just 52 percent. The RSP would be wise to mark the words of electoral expert Kåre Vollan that winning parties tend to believe the system that brought them to power will always work for them. The question they should be asking is: What is the system we would like to have if we lose the election?

That is the lesson the Congress and the UML should have learnt by now, having secured 11 and 5 percent of the seats in FPTP but 18 and 15 percent in PR. This is the second time PR has come to their rescue, the first being in the 2008 Constituent Assembly (CA) election. When they stormed to commanding heights in the 2013 CA election, the two parties watered down the PR part in the constitution and reduced it from 58 percent to the current 40 percent. Had they retained the same proportions, (everything else remaining equal) the number of their PR seats this time would have been 28 and 23, instead of 20 and 16.

All the parties would do well to keep in mind the adage of politics: What goes around comes around.