Effective leadership can only be achieved through further electoral reform
SOMALIA, in the Horn of Africa, remains one of the most unstable countries on the planet. Its governability continues to face many serious challenges, including persistent civil war, frequent drought and impending famine. Thankfully such existential problems don’t seem to be imminent threats to our society in these islands, and the piracy which makes large swathes of the North-Eastern Indian Ocean all but unnavigable today has not plagued our waters for several centuries.
Somalia currently has an indirect voting system, under which the president is designated by parliament, whose members are elected by clan representatives and so on.
After many years of bitter experience of this system, this war-torn country, many of whose population subsist on less than US$1 per day, now recognises that in order for its democracy to function, and for its leadership to be effective in bringing about lasting change, the electorate needs to be able to get behind a president whom it has directly elected. Their next election will be one person, one vote, with the winner taking office and then forming a government, as in the vast majority of effective democracies.
Our own system of government seems to be sleep-walking in the opposite direction. Our leaders have long lacked the ‘teeth’ to tackle the deep roots of the problems our island faces. We were promised ‘action this day’ at the start of the current term, yet the red tape (ribbon?) machinery has been in overdrive ever since. Perhaps if we were able to elect a leader directly, he or she would be able to act more decisively, with a stronger mandate, and with more manageable scrutiny and interference from those who work so hard to represent us in government by challenging their elected leadership and its direction of travel at any given moment.
As long as our States’ members continue to keep each other in a headlock, the problems we have are going nowhere. The only way out is through effective leadership, and it seems that the only way to achieve that is through further electoral reform.
DAVE HERSCHEL