Not long ago the MDP lead by Mohamed Nasheed and his few thousand supporters confidently did everything they could and finally when the first multi-party election came along they hoodwinked all the political parties to form a coalition with them and took the opportunity to secure the other party supporters vote to come to power. With coalition partners forced to leave, the MDP and Nasheed is ruling the country unconstitutionally.
We have let him carry on like this for two years. However his autocratic dictatorship has nothing in mind but give fellow MDPians a life of bliss, while the rest of the population is living at the brink of the society with their public service jobs taken away, their freedom and democratic right’s curtailed, with the threat of violence, drug, and crime destabilising their lives and communities on a daily basis.
Mohamed Nasheed is increasingly discovering that his dictatorship and the lavish life he gifted to his supporters alone will let him to rule the Maldives as long as he wants. We are to blame as we are letting him do this to us.
The suffering within us and our communities mean the time has come for the Maldivian people to step up the pressure and show that the government belongs to no body but the Maldivian people. Under Mohamed Nasheed we are living a life of persecution not only implemented by the President but also by his paramilitary die hard activists. Our communities as Nasheed’s sister Tory party call are broken societies where murders unheard of in the past; are now daily events.
Right in front of our eyes a one party regime is established by the MDP after securing power with the help of a coalition of parties which is no more. By giving a blind eye to this fact we are bringing our own demise. Our people and the helpless communities are agitated, many living a life of poverty and deprivation where inflation and unemployment and all the social ills that bring with it have destroyed our harmonious communities beyond repair.
We are supposed to be a democracy and in a democracy a leader that does not follow the democratic culture should be condemned. We have every right to take it to the streets and call for his resignation and this government has no right to disable and injure us if we do so in peaceful protests.
A President following the minority MDPians that are benefiting from him is going on undemocratically and unconstitutionally, but we are giving a blind eye to his wayward methods. Close to two years he has his die hard activists employed on a daily basis and the state coffers denied to the citizens and their communities are going to their pockets by forming creating political positions; Provinces, Councils, always using power of decree, a word unheard of and hardly exercised by a President of a democracy.
The former President HE Maumoon blessed us with the path of democracy and now Mohamed Nasheed has established a progressive dictatorship ruining everything that we worked so hard for during the years of political reform.
It is time that our grass roots, civil society organisations and communities wake up to this reality and rise against these MDPians and their’s only President. Our hospitals now wait and watch gravely ill patients die. Our schools are banning compulsory subjects including our local distinctive language to be proud of and the compulsory subject of Islam which makes sure that the children know and never forgot their roots.
Condemning the way President Nasheed is making us suffer is no longer enough. It is time we do more. Street protests, supporting and energising the opposition parties to bring back the democracy we worked so hard for should be at the heart of ending the economic, social and political demise we are facing today.
We should not be scared of tear gas. We should not be scared of electric batons. We should not be scared of water hoses. No matter how many police officers obey the President’s command to attack us, beat us, injure us, and suppress our democratic freedom if we all come out with the determination to end this autocracy we can end this.
It is time to revolt against the injustices, the hunger, the crimes, the deprivations. It is time to speak for those who got their jobs taken away. It is time to speak on behalf of the murder victims whose killers are still roaming in our streets to kill over and over again. It is time to give a voice to those people who are living in darkness because they are denied electricity. Mohamed Nasheed and his aides that belong to the MDP are a minority and we need a stable majority government to rule our country and lead us out of this dark hole.
We can no longer hide from the truth and ignore the sufferings of our people and our communities. We are responsible for getting hoodwinked and it is time to become wise and show that we the citizen’s of Maldives can lead the process of changing this autocracy to a democracy.
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