During his term Governor Mark Capes adopted a novel way to deal with dissent about his policies. He dismissed the people who pointed out the obvious flaws by saying they were “just being negative”.
It was a moderately successful tactic. Nobody wants to be thought of as negative. It did succeed in silencing a few people. The problem was that what the people were saying WASN’T negative. They were actually being positive, but their positive vision for the future of St Helena was simply different from his.
Donald Trump, while he was still allowed onto Twitter, often did the same. Anybody who said his policies were racist, divisive, xenophobic, irrational or downright stupid (and sometimes all of these) was “just being negative”.
I’ve noticed that this has now spread to groups on Facebook. Anyone who posts something criticising a policy adopted by the St Helena Government, saying for example that the policy is unlikely to work, or is not factually based, finds comments on their post accusing them of negativity. It’s almost at the point where everything the St Helena Government does is automatically classed by these people as positive and any suggestion that it might not be 100% correct is “being negative”.
It would be nice to believe that the St Helena Government is perfect, and that everything it does is the best possible thing it could have done in the circumstances. A government that cares for its people and always seeks solutions that provide the maximum benefit for all of its people sounds wonderful. Perhaps at some point in history such a government did exist for a time, though I must say I can’t remember ever having heard about it. But I believe you could fit all the people who think that is true of the current St Helena Government into a very small room – possibly a telephone box.
I will not dispute that St Helena Government strives to do its best. The people that work for St Helena Government mostly try hard to do their jobs well. But somehow it appears that the whole is often less than the sum of the parts. Put simply – St Helena Government sometimes mucks it up. Not always. Maybe not even the majority of the time, but sometimes. I do not need to give examples because anybody who has lived here for more than a few months will know this to be true.
What is wrong with pointing this out?
If you go to a business and receive poor service you should complain. You owe it to the business to do so. If nobody complains, how can they know they’re not doing it right? A well-made complaint tells the business what it did wrong and how it should have done it better. It helps them to improve.
Similarly, if nobody points out a flaw in what the St Helena Government is doing, how can it know it isn’t meeting the needs of all its people? It certainly won’t find out from an occasional Survey Monkey with carefully constructed questions that make it impossible to point out any real problems.
Complaint is good. Complaint is POSITIVE. Silencing complaint is the prerogative of despots and repressive regimes. Complaint should be encouraged.
So when the St Helena Government proudly announces that it has received “100 doses” of Covid-19 vaccine – enough for about 1% of the population – and when somebody points out that this will have very little effect in protecting the island from the virus (herd immunity requires vaccination for more than 70%) there is a POSITIVE point being made. The point is that it is not yet time to weaken our quarantine arrangements, and this is a point that needs to be made.
Speaking personally it doesn’t bother me when people accuse me of “being negative”. Mark Capes said it of me too, and look what happened to him[1]. I have the hide of a rhinoceros and have no intention of bursting into tears because somebody wasn’t nice to me. Maybe it’s a very-much scaled down variation of what journalists often say: “If someone isn’t trying to kill you, you really aren’t doing your job.”
Call me "negative" if you wish. All it tells me is that you can’t think of an argument to refute what I’m saying, and I’m totally happy with that.
[1] For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not taking credit for his downfall. He achieved that all on his own with almost no help from me.
