Tuesday, April 29, 2014

The Eternal Dilemma - The Candidate or the Party?

There is something wrong here. I am always caught in this dilemma - do I vote for the candidate or do I vote for the party?

In most cases if the candidate is good, then the party does not give me confidence at either state or even national level. On the other hand if the party is perceived as good because of its national leaders, then the local candidates do not inspire any trust.

For the past few elections I have gone to vote with this dilemma in mind and I know for sure that I voted for candidates and parties that lost. And maybe rightly so because for all their intentions they do not have the muscle nor momentum. The others had the momentum but lost all moral credibility.

How does one deal with this system of voting where let's say I have a good local candidate but belongs to an utterly spineless party that I do not wish to see in power at the top? So I vote for the candidate who is a hooligan and a landgrabber who represents a party that is promising a change but I know that this local representative of mine will not give two hoots for development here?

The more I see it the more local our interests should lie. If we all pick the right candidates here and hold them responsible for local problems, only then do we have a system where we have a bunch of leaders who are into development, who are for the people, representing us at the very top of policy making. How then are all the criminals and social rejects finding their way into the parliament? How is it that we are faced with a situation when we have almost no choice, save one half-decent candidate, from Prime Minister?

Someone find a way out of this please, this is just not working.

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