Things the people should know in defense of the vote and calypso
This article was first published at the end of the first week of the Lenten season, observed by Roman Catholics in the year two thousand and nineteen. It is meant for a Dominican audience in lieu of heightened partisan polarization and bickering coming out of the Carnival-Calypso season, a period which saw unprecedented partisan rhetoric very much common to such climate. The struggle to gain votes and to redefine Calypso away from its oversight responsibility and place it in a sort of bias partisan point of view gave rise to this response. This is an election year in Dominica and I argue that both the vote and Calypso have been paraded as scapegoats of a status quo which is unrelenting in its opposition to the people’s conscious demands for a new social order.
If your vote is honorable, and it should be, it should not be bought. I end by stating that fiscal incentives and vote buying are different things. Incentives are that which is given to citizens who are less well of – and that I support. Vote buying is willful manipulation of a system for selfish partisan political gains. It works only for a time, but the nation suffers in the long run, hence the need for my apprehension.
Younger Dominicans, you should know this and do all you can to avoid the corrupting of the system because this is the same corrupt system which you will inherit. What is probably most telling is that, it is harder to cleanse an electoral system from corruption than to corrupt.
What has happened to many citizens in several corrupt systems can happen to Dominicans. Just look around and see how many people are fleeing from Haiti, Venezuela, and Mexico to other shores, just to mention a few. Now, I am by no means suggesting that the situation in the aforementioned countries arose because of vote buying.
I simply state that those countries’ systems have become corrupt and that Dominica’s system can (and some say has) become corrupt if we do not take urgent stock. This is certainly not the sort of future that any fair-thinking citizen would want for their country, irrespective of how partisan they might be. I am very confident – based on my field studies over the years – that this ‘vote buying matter’ is commonplace within the Dominican electoral system.
This article is copyright © 2019 DOM767
