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The alibi

19 août 2013, 07:30

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I promise you, if I hear politicians talk about electoral reform one more time, I will scream. It’s astounding that a group of people who have supposedly dedicated their lives to the service of the public (I’m being purposely obtuse, I don’t believe a word of it) cannot for the life of them, sit down and devise a new electoral system for the country.

 


They all bug us with their lofty talks of how the current electoral system is no longer suited for us, how it has served us well but that it doesn’t refl ect the popular will anymore, how forty years after independence one must be able to call oneself a Mauritian, blah blah. All well and good but we’ve heard this hype so much we now know it by heart.

 


Yes, I want to scream at the politicians whenever I hear them wax lyrical about the electoral system, we know all that – in fact we know it so well it makes us nauseous every time you feed us the same propaganda.

 


How hard can it be, for crying out loud to sit, to discuss, to devise a new system and to adopt it? Bloody hard, apparently. So hard the geniuses at the helm of the country for over a decade now, have not been able to fi nd a solution to this problem. Yet, the gravity with which they talk about electoral reform suggests the issue keeps them awake at night. In truth, they don’t give a damn. For it’s not about true representation, it’s not about fairness in the system; that’s just what they say. In truth, they don’t care about all this. Electoral reform has become their alibi, something they use to divert attention or to negotiate a coalition. And that’s the crux of the matter; they cannot make a decision because their personal interests are too divergent.

 


Even when the matter has been taken out of their hands by the UN, they can’t for the life of them, put their agenda aside. Government cannot even have the decency to respect a commitment taken before the Human Rights Committee of the UN; the deadline has come and gone and still no sign of any paper, white or whatever. The MMM is so scared of alienating the Muslims they refuse to face an obvious fact; that we cannot continue to use a 40 year-old census for calculating actual representation of all ethnic groups.

 


They are so damn scared of their shadow that they cannot see the sense in Rezistans ek Alternativ’s battle for eradicating communalism from our electoral system.So we’re back to square one; we dilly-dally, we “talk talk”, we give ultimatums, we make promises, we justify procrastination but we cannot be bothered to take the one decision that needs taking; get rid of the Best Loser System, of the division of the electorate in terms of their religious or ethnic backgrounds and the mandatory declaration of ethnicity or religion.


Pathetic, is what I call it.