ROSEAU, Dominica, CMC – Former president of the main opposition United Workers Party (UWP), Lennox Linton, says the party remains confident that its annual leadership elections represent not a triviality. Still, a pillar of internal democracy “intended to keep us united, focused, and responsive to the people we serve”.
Linton responded to a recent statement by the current party leader, Dr. Thomas Fontaine, in which he described the constitutionally mandated annual leadership elections as a “wash-your-foot-and-come” affair.
Fontaine said he had concerns with the situation “because anybody comes off the streets, washes their feet, and challenges me for the leader.
“Are you really helping the party to have persons just come off the street every year and challenge for the leadership of the party. That’s what we have,” he added.
But in a statement, Linton, a former opposition leader, said that the National Executive Committee of the UWP had discussed the matter and that Fontaine has agreed to the release of the statement “because he wants us to ‘let the country decide”.
Linton said that in Dominican culture, the expression “wash your foot and come,” used disparagingly, as in this instance, suggests that the process in question is casual, unserious, and open to anyone and everyone without standards or structure.
“To apply such language to the Party’s leadership elections is therefore to imply that our Constitution creates an environment where leadership contests are unstructured and disorderly, trivial and undignified, and vulnerable to instability rather than rooted in democratic discipline.”
He said that the interpretation “is not only inaccurate; it is unfair to our founders, the framers of our Constitution, and to the thousands of members who have upheld it faithfully over the years”.
Linton, who resigned as party president in July this year, said that annual elections are not a “wash-your-foot-and-come” affair, adding “they are a deliberate democratic safeguard, designed to ensure accountability of leaders to the membership, regular renewal of mandate, transparency in the exercise of authority and the right of every member to participate meaningfully in the Party’s direction.”
He said far from weakening the UWP, these provisions strengthen it by ensuring that leadership is “earned, renewed, and reaffirmed, not assumed by entitlement or prolonged by inertia.
“To dismiss its processes with casual, disrespectful language is to misunderstand their purpose and to diminish the hard work of those who have sustained this movement through many decades,” he added.
and then , Lennox Linton, says the party remains confident that its annual leadership){kind=link}