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The apathy is mind-boggling
May 05, 2011 Editorial
From every indication the elections cannot be far off. There has been no word as yet from the Elections Commission about its state of readiness although the body has repeatedly said that it is ready. The commission has also said that there are still a large number of people who have not been registered because they simply have been without source documents.
This is a most distressing situation given that at birth most people would have been registered with the Registrar General Office. In the past thirty or forty years, everyone knew that without a birth certificate an individual was almost helpless. He could not attend school or access a clinic or obtain other crucial documents later in life. He or she was condemned to a life as a nonentity.
Certainly, if many people do not have birth certificates then it is as if they do not exist. And it is this non-existence that has come to affect the final preparations of the Elections Commission. We do not know how this could be corrected but it would seem that somehow there is the expectation that there is some record of the birth somewhere but that this record was not forwarded to the office of the Registrar General.
Beyond those who do not have source documents there are those who have registered but cannot take the time to uplift the identification cards. It suggests that these people are either apathetic or that they have left the jurisdiction. If it is apathy then it reflects what is happening in the country.
For the elections in 2006 in the wake of a house to house registration there was an electoral roll that had a certain number—some 490,000. When the vote was cast it transpired that the people who were registered were certainly not there. That was the verdict of the Elections Commission but the knowledgeable said that many people simply declined to vote.
If it was that people were not there to vote, then something must have gone wrong with the house to house registration. Certainly there were people who managed to secure multiple identification cards and there was the evidence on which no one acted.
This time around the number of voters could be much less once people refuse to uplift their identification cards and once the others fail to secure their source documents. And the former is likely to be the case because there is an apathy born out of a conviction that whether people elect either of the major political parties their lives would not change much.
But there is a remarkable amount of interest among the part of the young, especially those who are electronically competent. These are the new journalists. The volume of messages that flow across the electronic divide tells a story of a break from the race vote.
It is this social networking that played a signal role in the Middle East where leaders who have been in place for decades suddenly got forced out of office. Guyanese are using the very social network but not necessarily for the same purpose. Views are flowing fast and furious. Surely the political combatants are aware of what is flying across the networks.
For the first time, then, the various political parties have an idea of the nature of the campaign they must wage. In the past political campaigns were appeals to supporters with no idea of what the very supporters find of interest to them.
Now they know what the issues are. They see the communication and they are using the same social networking to reach even more people than the ordinary electioneering would have reached. For example, when resident Bharrat Jagdeo and PPP Presidential candidate paid a whistle stop visit to New York to meet with supporters they had knowledge of the issues. They knew the opposition views.
The attack against the private media is not incidental. These also reach every corner of the globe and they carry messages that the incumbent would not want outside the borders of the country. The audience circulates the messages contained in these papers. The result was that President Jagdeo and Mr Ramotar had no option but to launch a campaign against them.
Whatever the case, one could see a campaign with a difference and an election that could expose the apathy in the society unless either of the combatants manages to whip up excitement and spur up interest. President Jagdeo seems to be the one injecting the interest. He is cussing out his critics.
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