As an or­di­nary cit­i­zen who does not and has nev­er held a par­ty-card, I too joined the march to the Pres­i­dent's house. To­day I feel even more em­pow­ered to stand up and speak up if and when the sit­u­a­tion war­rants. On the heels of the Prime Min­is­ter's re­marks to the na­tion on the Sect 34 is­sue, I am dis­ap­point­ed and feel fur­ther slight­ed.

The PM's re­ac­tion, which now seems to have been deemed ur­gent on­ly as a con­se­quence of the per­sis­tent and very po­tent pub­lic out­cry (con­trary to the AG's, the Hous­ing Min­is­ter's and the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter's ram­blings) was the least that was owed to the pub­lic! In fact, it fell woe­ful­ly short on per­haps what may be con­sid­ered to be a most crit­i­cal fac­tor of the is­sue-that of the abysmal fail­ure of the of­fice of the AG in its fidu­cia­ry re­spon­si­bil­i­ty be­fore and even af­ter the fact.

I sus­pect that while the PM's speech bears some tones and sen­ti­ments of po­si­tions ar­tic­u­lat­ed by the three (above named) min­is­ters, there is a sense that no sim­ple lul­la­by would have put this 'drag­on' back to sleep and the PM was well ad­vised to not be dis­mis­sive since it would be to her gov­ern­ment's per­il.

I'm sure that the PP will learn from this lat­est de­ba­cle. How­ev­er, what I'm not sure about, is that they won't pull even more dar­ing stunts once there is mo­tive and op­por­tu­ni­ty! This is not the first of such mis­steps, we re­call. This lat­est fi­as­co seems to be con­firm­ing what now ap­pears to be en­dem­ic to the present dis­pen­sa­tion.

De­bra J John­son

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