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| Tuesday, 16 March 2004 |
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The new youth vote should turn the tide Facts are stubborn by Anton Gunasekera 'Send distractions far away - suffer not my thoughts to stray' said the sage of all sages while treading the path to individual freedom. To which Prince Charles added during an after-dinner speech in Melbourne, Australia in 1989: 'The youth of any country free enough to examine its own inner conscience, freed from the fetters of degenerating governance, is a land worth living in, a nation to be envied'. Though the discerning reader does not readily go by 'Statistics - darn lies', the Elections Department has publicly announced that 1.2 million youth will be casting (or will be eligible) to cast their maiden vote - come April 2 General Elections. But a top source (who seeks anonymity) at the Census and Statistics Department contends that the battalions of Grama Sevaka Niladharis attached to the islandwide network of Provincial and Divisional Secretariats are still sending in returns of eligible youth voters and that in the final data analysis, the maiden vote should exceed a near 1.6 million eligibles. They are the up and coming generation who emerged from the seven-year old 'Age of Reason' through adolescence to discerning youth through education and higher education, irrespective of whether they belong to parents from the urban, semi-urban or rural hinterland. No amount of political persuasion through well-known 'broken promises' could sway their conscience; they who are conscious of the deterioration of governance since that day in this new millennium when the governing promised the governed an island of peace, prosperity and plenty within a stipulated 100 days of winning the general election. How would we, therefore, as adults, know which way the new 1.6 million maiden vote would be cast at the April 2 hustings? As a longstanding member of the United Nations world body of supervisory governance, every Sri Lankan adult and youth, to whichever community or political party they have pledged their loyalties, has immense faith in that UN Family Agency - the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) when it spells out statistics pertaining to member nations. In its most recent report titled 'The State of the World's Children - 2004', UNICEF's Executive Director, Carol Bellamy, has registered Sri Lanka's literacy rate at 94 per cent (male) and 89 per cent (female) as at end year 2002, much to the chagrin of next door 'Big Brother' India's 68 per cent (male) and 45 per cent (female). Hence, with big and small brother both poised to determine the future ruler of the ruled, it is unmistakeably clear that the maiden 1.6 million Sri Lankan youth voters - both male and female - have already made up their minds, nay, their consciences on who could and should govern the governed in our nation from April onwards. Unemployment and underemployment within the rank and file of qualified youth, unabated student unrest in our islandwide network of universities and vocational institutions, a growing predominance of family fights between sons and daughters and mothers and fathers on the lack of their 'daily needs', the rank and file of the now affluent governing coteries created this sorry situation for today's youth who are destined to take over leadership from where we go. Of the estimated 840,000 Sri Lankans scattered around the earth's two hemispheres, and are eligible for postal voting rights as men and women who have stubbornly stuck to their right of Sri Lankan citizenship, for whom would those votes be cast? The discerning reader of this column has a right to question: "Is rigging of votes in the offing?" As Titus said in testament: "Let no man look down on your youth because the child is the father of man," so be it that politician and publican who are hand in glove to sway the voting pattern will not fall by the wayside in the deceptive art and science of youth's vote-wooing, because the wisdom of the adult world in the eyes of educated youth is pretty foolishness. After giving an audience of university youth, what he considered a stirring fact-filled political campaign speech, the Republican candidate for the State of Illinois, USA, pointed his finger at the still silent young men and women prospective voters and very confidently asked: "Now, children - do you have any questions?" Arizona State University's final year post-graduate engineering student Mathew Dalton rose up and asked: "Now that you have delivered to us your package of Republican pontifications, could you in the name of Lincolnian 'for the people, by the people, of the people' true democratic tent, ask your rival Democratic candidate to address us with his anti-Republican package of equally misleading democratic demogogy?" He was Gone with the Wind. We can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but never all the people all the time. True no? |
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