For a long time now, Guyana has been a nation ripe with civic displeasure as expressed in personal decisions to disengage from the electoral process and on a more crucial level, the decision to simply pack up and leave.
Majority rule is the germ of a political system as indicated in a previous discussion and for some of us, supporting the electoral process translates into an endorsement of it. Thus, every five years we consciously sit the elections out, which is a powerful expression beyond the obvious explanation of apathy.
But here is the problem with exercising this democratic right not to vote; the message of discontent gets tangled in the wider picture of voters who are unable to exercise their franchise for other reasons. These are the people in our country who are living in such misery they do not bother to register; those who are ill and might not make it to a polling station; and those like myself who are registered but are temporarily outside of Guyana.
Voters who reason that non-voting is their democratic right are correct; we have the freedom not to choose our government in a democracy, the freedom not to give a government consent over our lives. It is an issue of personal liberty so why drag disinterested citizens to the polls?
But refusing to vote does not remove civic displeasure. In fact, it is passive way of saying “Your five year rule was miserable”. I believe there is real action in voting, and that voting forcefully ventilates civic displeasure, which is why I am calling on Guyanese who feel discontent not to sit our elections out this year.
We register our economic, social and political discontent not by sitting the elections out, but by voting against the incumbent. What is unfortunate though is that our political opposition seems permanently divided, which means discontent could never be registered in any structured way.
To say that voting today will change policies and bring an end to empty promises would be deceptive. However, voting against an incumbent government which has failed to deliver on promises including basic provisions such as affordable housing, clean water and stable electricity, forcefully indicates what is wrong with the system.
Our democracy is flawed yes, and the average citizen is disengaged from politics except during elections, but democracy ought to be everybody’s business. If we do not accept this, we have a long road to walk before it begins to work for us.
The time has come for us citizens to invest our political energies in the system to make it work. Through civic engagement let us begin the hard task of fixing our democracy, and a good place to begin would be showing respect for universal suffrage (having the opportunity to vote).
Consider this fact, we pay taxes to keep the state going, we adhere to the laws to keep our society from descending into anarchy and we vote to preserve our democracy or at least our version of it. This is the value of our vote, and every citizen whether we support the incumbent or the opposition needs to understand how valuable it is.
I know a fair amount of persons who will abstain from today’s vote and for them, it is a rational choice. For some, when you do the calculations one vote does not really affect the outcome of the election; it is not decisive.
But when we vote, do we express a partisan preference or is it a civic duty? Or do we vote out of concern for our democracy? Our elections in Guyana have come to mean party identification and too many political actors are peddling the line of constituencies; in some instances, ethnic constituencies.
And the electoral process is not about political parties and or their constituents though both play a crucial role; it is about our democracy. In the absence of it our democracy has no legitimacy, which is why non-voting is harmful.
We should as a nation decide that our democracy is going to change and work towards this by participating in the electoral process. Voting should not be solely about which party we support, it should be about the quality of leadership we expect from those who are elected, the quality of democracy we receive, and the quality of life in our country.
Voting is a powerful expression and it shows commitment in the democratic process. What saddens me is that my generation is less likely to vote though we have emerged as a significant voting bloc, but there is hope that as we age, our propensity to vote increases.
What is interesting is that education raises an interesting paradox: the better educated we are, the less likely we seem to participate in what is obviously a broken democratic system. But why abstain when we have so much work ahead of us?