THRONE Speeches by this Governor General are always worth every word, every minute of attention — and this year was no different. Unexpectedly though, Her Excellency started and ended her 2016 version on a General Elections note.
On Tuesday, she asked that we vote not just for whom we like but for who will love us all, not for our pockets only but for the full family, the entire community, the whole nation. The Dame urged that we think well before — and when we do, to decide to Vote for Saint Lucia.
Referring to calls for a fixed election date, Dame Pearlette indicated the government may follow Britain and turn a new page. A proposal from the Review Commission proposes renaming the Governor General as President in a new constitutional formula that will see a Saint Lucian hybrid of both the Westminster Monarchial and American Republican systems. The UWP says it will opt to make Saint Lucia a republic — and a set date for elections.
These positions are all worth discussing, including whether our current five-year term should also be reduced to four years. But since none of the above can be implemented before the next General Elections, voters are now challenged to know the differences between the systems being proposed, to choose which they would prefer to choose when that time comes.
As we inch quickly towards the general elections, it is issues like those raised by the GG that the local media needs to help voters discuss. Citizens who will vote need to know if a fixed election date will change things for the better, or just be another exercise in the futility of copycat politics.
Unfortunately, as fate would have it, our major media players today behave like they have opted to shirk their responsibilities to the voting public and left the process of pre-election public discussion and engagement solely to the Governor General. But as our fate has also had it since 1997, we also have a GG who has never failed to take the issues to the people in every speech she has delivered in the last 19 years from our national throne — and in both our national tongues – in the languages we all can understand.
But then, how can we follow-up on what The Dame said Tuesday when what she said didn’t even make the top story in the news anywhere Tuesday night?
Evidently, the newsmakers and current affairs agenda-setters are still much more interested in headlines about rape, suicide and teenage pregnancy, murder and manslaughter, accidents and road fatalities. Helping the undecided to decide which party can, may, build or will better lead and rebuild Saint Lucia after the next general elections is still of lesser consequence.
As I watched and listened to the GG Tuesday morning, I itemized a dozen news items coming out of her Speech. All were new announcements – from the upgrading of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College to a University College and the building here of an OECS Hall of Justice, from the appointment of a special fourth judge to hear overdue cases to the reduction in the number of remands at Bordelais by 9%, from identification of the location for the national museum to the construction of a new national cultural complex, from target dates for reduction of Green House emissions to target dates for renewable energy transmissions.
The Dame was also full in her praise for the leading role Saint Lucia played in getting the voice of small islands heard at the Paris negotiations leading to the historic Climate Change signings in New York last weekend. The entire House – in joint sitting – applauded the role of Senator Dr Jimmy Fletcher, the Saint Lucia Minister who showed the world that small people and countries can do big things on the world stage.
The 2016 Throne Speech was also historic, as it opened the 6th Session of the 10th Parliament and Her Excellency did say it may be her last before the next General Elections. But as I wrote this article 24 hours later, the only part that had been reported was her hint that Saint Lucia may have a fixed election date some day.
I could have expected that by now the press here will have been more interested in trapping the signals of gubernatorial legislative intent offered in this speech every year, than in the shape and colour of the GGs hat and how it matches outfit. But, for reasons I regret every year, I was (again) not surprised.
After all, in a land where letters from lawyers to the press are torn in public — in real time and living colour on your TV — and where big media people find they are too big to say sorry, who am I not to expect the unexpected?
After all…