The recent election results in Barbados that resulted in the massive and no doubt well deserved victory of Prime Minister Mia Mottley and her Barbados Labour Party, I find rather troubling. Troubling because of the level of voter turnout at the polls.
Looking further afield in America, the 2024 Presidential election showed 75 million voters for Kamala Harris and 77 million for Donald Trump, while 89 million eligible voters didn’t vote at all!
In Jamaica, 61% didn’t think it was important to participate in the 2025 General Election. In the 2020 election that number was 63%. Do these people realise the pain and torture their African foreparents went through fighting for freedom and access to the polls? So many even lost their lives! And now we take it for granted.
Do our people really know what democracy demands of us? The recent Jamaican elections were plagued by charges of some politicians paying constituents to stay away from the polls in order to shore up their numbers. To arrive at a place where a vote can be bought and sold to the highest corrupt bidder is totally unacceptable in any serious democracy. Information coming from several constituencies across Jamaica since the general election suggest that this behaviour was rampant.
Democracy demands work, and the weakest link in the process is always the followership. Until people realise and accept that politics is more than political parties, sadly, we will continue to experience low participation at the polls. In the final analysis, so much depends on education of our people in general, and on political education in particular. A cursory glance at some significant projects that are sadly taken for granted in Jamaica by our people since Independence 63 years ago follows.
- The National Insurance Scheme (NIS)
- Our National Stadium
- University of the West Indies (UWI)
- University of Technology (UTech)
- Universal Adult Suffrage
- Numerous Primary and High Schools
- Our 1938 Trade Union Act
- The National Housing Trust (NHT)
- College of Agriculture, Science, and Education (CASE)
- Caribbean Maritime University
- National Youth Service (NYS)
- Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ)
- National Family Planning Board
- Family Court
- The Edna Manley College for Visual and Performing Arts
- The Greater Portmore Housing Development
- National Water Commission (NWC)
- Repeal of the Master and Servants Act
- Repeal of the bastards Act
- Right of union representation in the workplace
- Equal pay for women
- Maternity Leave with pay
- The National Minimum Wage
- Lowering of voting age to 18
- Universal access to secondary education
- Providing free access to tertiary education for a whole generation of Jamaicans!
- National Health Fund (NHF)
All the above and so many more are a result of politics, not from private sector initiatives. We must never ever forget that had many of these initiatives not been introduced as critical elements in the fabric of the society, Jamaica would have been still wandering around in the 1940s and 50s. In my lifetime, the only time political education was ever taken seriously was in the 1970s. Since then, it has been missing in action. The formal education system, with all its flaws, has long stopped insisting on the serious study of Civics in our schools. The resultant effect of that lapse is seen daily in the general ignorance displayed by too many “graduates” from the education system. Some even in our Parliament!
World history has shown that it usually is not difficult for countries to slip from democracy to authoritarianism. Leaders with dictatorial intentions are usually adept at recognizing apathy among the electorate and take advantage of it. Politically ignorant populations are easy and ready targets for those with despotic inclinations.
We all love to talk about our love for democracy and free speech, however, unlike other forms of political structures, democracy requires work. Work not just by the leaders, but the led. Unfortunately, too many of the led are simply not up to it. There is a lot of work to be done not just in Jamaica but in the Caribbean and in countries around the world that practice and value democratic ways of life.
As a starting point, they could seriously consider compulsory Civics and political education in school curricula. The future truly belongs to our young people, and they need to learn early that they do have a stake in shaping it.
