Mad rush

 Last night I went along to the Jamestown “public engagement” meeting to hear what the Governor’s unrepresentative body had to say about its proposals to change how government works on St Helena.  I have three things to report:

1.       It seems we will soon be invited to vote on whether or not we want “Ministerial Government”, but exactly how that would work has not been fully thought through.  The speakers could not answer many of the audience’s questions and one of them openly stated that he had not read all the detail in the Sarkin report, on which their work is supposedly based.

We are being asked to vote for a vague notion with no idea what the final result will look like.

A bit like being asked to commit irrevocably to buying a house when they can’t tell you what district it’s in, how many bedrooms it has, whether it is on a big plot or a tiny one, etc. etc.

This is not satisfactory.  They should do the work properly and ask us to vote on a real, functional package, not a vague notion, however attractive that notion might be.

2.       It seems to me that this whole process is being rushed through to meet some arbitrary deadline, presumably set by the Governor.  It is NOT necessary that we get this done in time for the 2021 election (probably in July).  It is better to get it right than to do it quickly.  There will be other elections; they can be called at any time.  The current system is not so bad that we have to rush into a quick fix that has not been properly thought through.  Governor Rushbrook may want it all done and dusted during his term so that he can put it on his CV, but I think it’s better that before we make such a radical change to how government works on St Helena we should first take the time to make sure it’s the RIGHT change, and that it will actually work in practice.

Otherwise we may end up, as the saying goes, jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.  As one attendee put it last night “Better the devil we know ....”

3.       When the subject of the Governor’s powers came up it was extremely disappointing to hear the speakers saying that Saints are not yet ready to take control of their own destiny so need a Governor to stay in control and make sure everything is OK.

I strongly reject this defeatist attitude.  Saints, in my opinion, are as capable of controlling their own destiny as any other people in the world.  Yes, perhaps mistakes will be made, but they will be “our” mistakes, as opposed to the mistakes forced upon the people of St Helena by a middle-ranking civil servant appointed to us by London.  Can anyone tell me Governors and other appointees from London have never made mistakes?

We have a Human Right of self-determination. Britain should stop interfering with that right.

Please go along to your local meeting and see if you find the same as I did. For the schedule follow the link below:

https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2020/news/governance-commission-programme-of-public-engagement/