Last week I spoke of the growing perception, even among the supporters of the APNU+AFC government, that what happened at the last general elections was, as they say on the streets, an exchange not a change of government. This assessment of the ‘person in the street’ is not without substance. For example, after lambasting the PPP/C for rejecting the collective bargaining process and unilaterally imposing salary increases on public servants and promising in its 2015 election manifesto to ‘enforce the principles and laws governing collective bargaining in accordance with our commitments under the International Labour Organisation [and] restore collective bargaining for all the relevant elements of the public service’, the government is now doing essentially what the PPP did!
Notwithstanding this kind of behaviour, I argued that the exchange scenario is too simplistic and is only a symptom of a more fundamental condition, namely our ethnic divide, which disenfranchises most of us by making our vote meaningless. By this I mean that a vital element of a vote is its capacity to secure an alternative government but that since most of us have given up this element, the party in government need not pay much mind even to its own supporters. However, this is not an outcome of our individual or collective desire; it is structural disenfranchisement!