“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” ~ Robert M. Hutchins
The UIMSA elections are around the corner and while some positions have a number of people vying for them, most notably the presidential seat, others have no one or just one person gunning for them. This presents a problem as there wouldn’t really be any voting for the best candidate. You would be voting for the only candidate, or no candidate at all.
When no one runs for a position during the general elections, by-elections are held where people who are interested in a position, but didn’t come out initially for whatever reason, can then try to be selected. This was the case for a good number of executive positions last tenure. This takes away the voting rights of UIMSAites as the voting process is not open to everyone.
Currently, most of the executive positions have people running for them with the SDO preclinical position seemingly hot cake right now as four people are going for it, but apart from this and the office of the president, no other executive position has more than a single person going for it, and there is no known aspirant for sports secretary at this moment. The lack of competition presents us with a lack of options to vote for, and while some may argue that you could simply vote against someone, that is quite unlikely to happen unless they’ve probably really pissed you off.
Moving on to the legislative positions, there is a stark contrast at both ends of the class spectrum, 2k23 at the moment seems to be the class with the highest number of people interested in representing their class, having ten people run for senate and seven for congress while 2k18 has only 3 people gunning for senate and zero for congress. On average, UIMSA classes have at least a hundred and fifty people yet most are struggling to find sixteen representatives.
This is quite poor and significant of an apparent apathy towards UIMSA elections. If things continue like this, we may end up not having people aspire for posts which would pose a problem for UIMSA as an organisation.
- – Ifeanyichukwu Achife.
One comment
I don’t quite agree with the sentiments expressed here. I reckon that the word “apathy” is loosely thrown around.
At full capacity, UIMSA senate and congress request 16 representatives per class- an estimated 10% of any class population. This ridicules the idea of ‘representative’ democracy.
Also, Oyo state house of assembly has 33 members only vs UIMSA which requires 82 members to be directly involved in decision making. There’s a grave mismatch somewhere, and I don’t think it’s in Oyo state..