What will 2025 hold for Our Country

In another couple days we will enter the final month of the year. November was one hell of a month with regard to the weather. It is usually the month we can expect most rain but this year it was special with virtually continuous rain accompanied most of the time by thunder and lightning, the effects possibly of climate change. Our people are behaving equally strange. This is the time of year when we tend to focus on football, but just imagine we are hosting the Bangladesh Cricket team to a series involving tests, T20s and One Days. We are hosting the three T20s in December, interestingly too, very near to Christmas. In December we normally expect drier weather, but we better don’t bet on that. In any event, it is the time when we get into the Christmas spirit and revive the traditions of that season.

Many will see it as a period when they could explore their entrepreneurial ambitions. Barrels come from relatives and friends abroad with goods to be sold. This is becoming more difficult with the restrictions on road side vending, although prospective seasonal vendors find creative ways to do their trade, getting around the imposed restrictions. The season brings its trials and tribulations as most persons try to make the best of it.

As we move into the new year 2025, the country will be transformed into a veritable political battleground. The Silly Season, which I have already declared, will be in full focus. It marks really the end of the five-year period in which the Westminster system allows the last party elected to office to govern before once more facing the voting public to have its mandate renewed or taken away from them. It also gives the Prime Minister or Leader of the country the authority to call elections whenever he or she feels. Only that individual really knows the date on which the elections will be held, unlike what obtains in the American system. Once the date is declared it gives the electorate its only real exercise of power, except that many of the voting public do not fully appreciate this. This is one of the trappings of what is in reality a deformed ‘democratic’ system that has left behind the values and norms that had shaped and given meaning to it.

The basic principle is that adults over 18 years of age have the right to select a government of their choice. It is a sort of contract which in another five years will be renewed or cancelled. It is however not as simple and easy as it appears. All things come into play. Those who were once the subjects of the voting populace have over the years become unapologetically their masters. And the longer they retain hold of the government, the worse it gets because they begin to believe that they are really exercising ownership. It can reach the stage where they give the impression that the voting public and the people generally live on a plantation that they own.

The Silly Season arises when those who exercise the power they have assumed, plot to retain it. The goal then changes. Those who were elected to provide governance and facilitate the development of the people give priority to projects that would facilitate the growth of the political power that they grabbed. South African analyst, Pali Lehohla, describes the ‘Silly Season’ as toxic, and of being deprived of the proper ingredients for sound policy making.

The exercise leading to the holding of elections on the surface looks logically simple. Theoretically it should involve the incumbent reporting to the people of the nation on what they had done over the past five years or, for that matter, the number of years the party has been in power.

Those in Opposition or those seeking office are expected to critique that report and show that their policies, their manifesto offer a better alternative. The question that has to be asked is, to what extent did their policies benefit the people. Very often we get photographs of structures as though those structures could talk and tell the story of how their existence will benefit the people of the country.

Lurking in the background are issues of poverty, unemployment and crime, to single out a few, which had not been tackled.

What the populace is left with are promises of better things to come. You might be able to get away with this for a term or two, but once you get beyond that then there is no argument justifying the retention of their contract. The right to vote every five years means little in the scheme of things. A well informed and critical public is desperately needed. There are of course so many other things at stake.

The Vincentian public is left to decide if it will re-elect a government that has been in office for over 24 years but find the country they love, virtually at the bottom in so many areas when compared to their neighbours. Sober thinking and serious reflection are needed. Are some of us still about selling our votes and living hand to mouth for the next five years? This is a decision that many will have to make.