Strengthening our democratic institutions

There’s a fundamental reason behind the NMI’s guaranteed rights to self-government under the Covenant Agreement. It wasn’t made a part of the document for purposes of granting federal bureaucrats or anybody else the grand opportunity to toy around with it. Nor is local leadership granted such right either.

But the very exercise of effective self-rule involves a long process; a process that leaves room for error or mistakes. It is a process that requires proactive responsibility to partake in strengthening the rule of law in our democratic institutions. Indeed, we’ve taken our share of cuts and bruises from our mistakes, and it took a rude awakening to return to basics to rectify such issues as labor and immigration involving foreign workers.

In the process, we’ve also overlooked qualitative issues in our community. Today, we are wary of the problems that change has brought into the livelihood of what was traditionally a simple lifestyle of the indigenous people. Change, however, is inevitable. We’ve moved from subsistence to a money economy which comes in two major forms: service and manufacturing.

Like fundamental changes that the Information Technology has brought to people in the global village, no one knew then the consequence of how personal computers would impact on such famous office equipment as IBM typewriters, once the cadillac of office clerks and secretaries. Today, it’s Apple/Macintosh, IBM Compatible, Gateway
2000 and other PCs. Typewriters have basically become history. It’s personal computers that has opened up so much information and services with the click of a mouse.

But for all the modern conveniences that the IT brought to thriving communities, it equally left on our laps its own set of difficulties brought about by the powerful element of change. That’s the price of modernity.

Be that as it may, the guaranteed rights to self-government requires that we do not lose focus of our citizenship responsibility to strengthening our democratic institutions. It has been a long and difficult 20-year journey. That we may have been negligent doesn’t grant Interior’s OIA to ruin the very essence of democracy or republican form of government in the NMI. This very right and exercise reside in the governance of these islands.