The political monopoly of the two so-called major parties are fielding 80 candidates between them. There are 16 other parties fielding 65 candidates in General Election 2020 and also five independent candidates. That is 70 candidates other than the political monopoly.
There are 41 elections for MP that make up General Election 2020.
But the political monopoly tell electors that who you choose as your parliamentary representative is not important once you put either side of the monopoly in office either as government or opposition.
With the number of options available in these elections, electors have the opportunity to choose which candidate they feel can best represent them in Parliament. The electors must make the correct choice of representative.
For those who have been saying “no more red or yellow,” scrutinise and question every candidate and choose your best representative.
The line-up of candidates more resembles the choices that existed before the cementing of the two-party monopoly in 1956-58. This is your opportunity to break out of the choiceless two-party trap and elect a Parliament of Representatives first.
Reject the political monopoly parties narratives against the other parties’ and independent candidates and their right to contest the elections.
Once you make the correct choice, the Parliamentarians will select the government from among themselves following the rules in our Constitution.
The crisis facing our nation and society calls for a different kind of Parliament, a Parliament for the national interest; not another Parliament of sectoral party interests.
We may use different words, but we speak the same language.
Why? Because we are examining and trying to find a solution to the same problem.
You call them tribal monoliths. I call them the political monopoly.
In essence, the so-called major parties are no different from the two-party cartel Democrats and Republicans of the US or Labour and Conservatives of the UK or by whatever names they go by in Germany or the “largest democracy”—India.
“Representative Democracy” has convinced the vast majority of the body politic in every country that calls itself a “western” democracy that there are anointed “politicians.”
The electors are led to believe that there is a special class of men/women whose social function is the conduct of political affairs and the rest of society (the one per cent parasitic oligarchy excepted) are assigned the social function (civic duty) to vote either of two sides of the “aisle,” the political divide to “rule” and exercise a power to deprive the majority of a voice or role in the business of society’s decision-making in all matters that affect our lives and the future of social life.
This status quo is liberally punctuated with participants in the ritualistic election cycles promising “change,” which results in the protection of the fortunes of the minority of rich and powerful by those who exchange positions in the seating arrangements of government and opposition to maintain the illusion of the exercise of “choice.”
In GE 2020, with 150 candidates in the ratio 80:70 between those of the monolith parties and the “others,” independents included, there is choice that suggests the possibility of at last having different voices in a Parliament configured with more “aisles” than one and the possibility of alternative points of view engaged in serious debate on issues with more than just the rigid perspectives commanded by the whips of leaders of government or opposition business.
Business which is that of the political monopoly parties but not the business of the society and its members.
The 70 candidates not of the two-party monopoly are hounded out of the race by the red and yellow “champions of democracy” denouncing anyone who dares claim the desire to offer a different voice or perspective as “vote splitters or nuisance value” as irrelevant because they do not have enough candidates; though in fact, the rules of the electoral process recognise no qualifying threshold to the title of party or candidate.
The monoliths attempt to maintain their monopoly of the electoral process by delegitimising all other voices.
The first-past-the-post winner take all electoral system and the exclusion of the electors from the selection of candidates also guarantee the status quo, backed up by the big spend of the “major parties” to exclude the other voices from access to the “traditional media” and space, which should be guaranteed to all participants if this was a really Fair contest.
So much of “reality” is just illusion, as one of calypso bards put it in song.
That is why democratic renewal of the electoral and political processes is the necessity for change of this moment if the governance arrangements of our societies are to be truly representative in content that puts the electors in the position of decision-makers with the responsibility of deciding the future for all who constitute the nation and exercise the sovereignty which has been usurped by the minority.
The only guarantee of free and fair elections is a vigilant and invested electorate with an independent and uncompromised Judiciary. We don’t have too look far to understand that.
The current experience of Guyana is the most recent object lesson of this reality.
An informed and involved electorate is our best guarantee of fair elections. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Five years now, many people saying “No More Red or Yellow!”
In GE 2020, 70 candidates are neither red nor yellow.
This your chance to elect some of them to Parliament. We need different voices in Parliament.
Time to end the red-yellow political monopoly. Time for a Parliament of national purpose; not sectoral party interests.