Submitted by DAVID COMISSIONG, Citizen of Barbados
When a governmental administration wilfully disregards and disobeys the rulings of its own Chief Justice and Court of Appeal judges, the very structure – judicial, political and moral – of the State is in danger of being destroyed!
And when such wilful disregard and disobedience relates to a Constitutional right as fundamental as the right of the people to vote and to determine into whose hands the powers of governance will be reposed, it means that what used to be a legitimate Constitution-based nation-state is in danger of implosion!
It means that the Rule of Law no longer exists! It means that the Bill of Rights contained in the Constitution is no longer of consequence! Indeed, it means that the very notion of legitimate constitutional government has become irrelevant!
It has now become absolutely clear that the Freundel Stuart led DLP administration has undergone a degeneration that is absolutely unprecedented in the history of Barbadian Democracy!
By exhibiting its determination to prevent duly qualified Barbadian residents from being able to exercise their right to vote, and by also further demonstrating that it is prepared to go so far as to willfully disobey and disregard the rulings of the Supreme Court of Barbados in achieving its illegal objective, the Stuart regime has provided irrefutable proof not only of its degeneration but of the degeneration of the regime’s very conception of government.
In other words, the regime has boldly informed Barbadians that it no longer considers that it is bound to operate in accordance with the democratic norms and principles enshrined in the Constitution or Supreme Law of Barbados. Indeed, the regime has boldly declared that it is prepared to be a Mafia and to operate in accordance with the norms and practices of a Mafia.
And once this type of descent into unconstitutional lawlessness occurs, the society must prepare itself for violence – a “cracking of skulls and shooting of people” in order to either maintain an illegitimate governmental regime in power or to launch a counter effort to achieve a violent restoration of some sort of legal connection between the institution of government and the people.
My fellow Barbadians, if our eyes are open and if we are thinking seriously about the underlying implications of this determined effort on the part of the Stuart regime to deny the voting rights of Commonwealth citizens who are lawfully resident in Barbados, we will recognize that the Stuart regime has brought us all to the edge of the abyss !
It is the same type of abyss that several of our fellow CARICOM states have been pitched into in the past – namely Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Suriname and Jamaica. We have often said that it couldn’t happen in “our” Barbados. Well we were wrong, and our day of reckoning is here.
Let us bestir ourselves and ensure that we do not allow the regime to pitch us into that awful abyss! The Freundel Stuart regime is playing with fire. Let us ensure that we take decisive steps to extinguish that fire before it consumes us.
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