ODM must be reminded that polls are about obeying rules of the game

One of the things that happened to humankind once capitalism became a dominant mode of production, first in Western Europe and then in the rest of the world, is that people were compelled to live under certain rules governing political, economic and social life. This is what came to be known as “the rule of law”. That is doing things which, even when they are unpalatable to one individual, are acceptable as “normal forms of behaviour” commensurate with keeping harmonious relations in capitalist society even though this very society continued to be replete with many contradictions inherent in its very nature.

To constitute means to “bring together”. This is where the word constitution came from. That is a gathering together of a whole body and precepts meant to govern society as a single—a constituted—political community. Where capitalism first prospered like in England, beginning with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century, a whole body of principles and laws, the corpus of constitutional law, was central to capitalist development.