EDITORIAL: Facing The Future

BY the time we come out next week, the speculations will have been history and the running mates will have emerged. Mercifully, we can now proceed to assess soberly what is at stake.

A lot is at stake. The figures about the fiscal sustainability of the country is to say the least disturbing. With more people pushed into poverty and foreign exchange shortages, inducing layoffs in the manufacturing sector, we ought to be sober. In addition, we have the never-ending problem of insecurity.

This should not be the time for fixations on personalities. The electorate must demand programs. To tackle the myriad of problems we face, the country must be presented with a rigorously worked out costed with fixed timelines a program of social and economic reconstruction. Such a program will breathe new life into a dispirited and dysfunctional republic and rekindle of a national rebirth. 

No advance of a sustainable nature will be made without a revamp of the framework of the constitution. The rent collecting constitutional framework has spectacularly failed. It has to go. In replacement, we must go back to the revenue production base of the Macpherson and the 1960, 1963 constitutions. The empirical evidence is unambiguous – they facilitated sustainable development as opposed to the country “growth without development” and alarmingly “the development of underdevelopment”. 

The coming election will be decisive for the future of the country, it should be based on elevated discourses not vacuous mendacities and vote buying. We simply for the sake of all do not have a choice.