TIME TO FORM A GOVT IS NOW

Everywhere, general elections provide an opportunity for the electorate to exercise their right to choose a government they believe can make their lives and those of their future generations better.

In most countries, such an opportunity comes once in every five years, and if the electorate makes a poor decision, they have themselves to blame because they would have to live with a bad government for the next five years.
This is a fact of life! That is why in such a situation, it is true that life is what you make it.

In our scenario, some politicians and aspiring candidates for public political office have no obligation to a manifesto or even governing policies, as they would join government as individuals and not as a prospective governing party, which gets mandated to control the public purse and govern in terms of the policies they promised the electorate during the campaign.

And that is why it would be a lie for a politician or aspirant to promise good roads and bridges because they do not control the purse, but the only few individuals who can operationalise service delivery are government ministries, which get allocations for their different specified tasks.

lack of political education

Therefore, the lack of political education has always led both the aspiring politicians and the electorate to believe that service delivery for their basic needs and priorities are the prerogative and tasks of the Members of Parliament (MPs), and this is something nowhere near the truth.

The role of the MPs is to monitor the executive, make laws, represent the interests of the electorate, debate and pass budgets for the executive to run the operations of government, including but not limited to service delivery.

The truth about this current system of government, the success of an MP should be judged on the legislations they pass into law and how they apply themselves in playing the oversight role, raising of issues that are a concern to the electorate they represent. It is the executive that is financed through the budget to ensure service delivery and not MPs.

Due to the lack of in-depth civic education, some politicians and aspiring politicians campaign and canvass for votes by promising to build roads, bridges, provide funeral services, offer scholarships and even go on to dishing out food parcels and sometimes provide cash to voters - which are activities that border on prohibited campaign  practices and completely incongruent with the universal and current election laws.

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