Saba News News and Information from Saba Island, Dutch Caribbean
On Wednesday, March 17th, 2021 the Second Chamber Election takes place. On February 1st, the Rijksdienst Caribisch Nederland (RCN) has started a campaign to inform all residents on Bonaire, St. Eustatius, and Saba about the upcoming election. This campaign focuses on the voting process and the measures that will be taken to make sure everyone can vote as safely as possible in this unusual time.
The Second Chamber consists of 150 members who represent the Dutch population, including the residents of Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba. The role of the Second Chamber is to control the government and to make new laws together with the government. The members decide on issues such as education, health, environment, economy and more.
Once every 4 years, the election for the Second Chamber takes place. Residents of the Caribbean Netherlands with Dutch nationality, who are 18 years or older and are not excluded from the right to vote, may go to the polling station. They will receive a personal voting pass by mail.
Residents of the islands will be informed about the upcoming election by means of newspaper advertisements, radio, posters, and TV commercials. Furthermore, Facebook will be widely used and all general information can be found on the campaign website. RCN carries out this information campaign on behalf of the Minister of Interior and Kingdom Relations. The public entities are responsible for the organization of the upcoming election.
Visit www.rijksdienstcn.com/secondchamberelection for more information or visit the Facebookpage Tweede Kamerverkiezing CN2021.
Vote for yourself, care for the future. Every vote counts!
RCN
Many new parties, but also some special events parties, like the Feestpartij of Johan Vlemmix.
And then there was also the Ubuntu Connected Front, a new party that wants attention. On their website only the leader Regillio Vaarnold (LinkedIn: ‘Chairman of the Board and CEO’) is mentioned, as so is it in the press. But only by an article in BES-reporter we know that there are also Statian candidates on their list. But unfortunately they still have a lot to learn about marketing, ’cause even on Statia they are scarcely known.
First about the strange name Ubuntu. Those with some IT knowledge think immediately to Ubuntu, an Open Source Operating System, linked to Linux. But the people of this party have a different translation. It should mean according to them: ‘I am, because we are’. Although this phrase is linguistically not correct, it does not mean something extraordinary or revolutionary. In fact, it is meaningless! To me, at first, it brought remembrance to the 16th century French philosopher René Descartes, who wrote: ‘Cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think, so I am’. Without going into detail about the meaning of this, you could imagine that this party did not think that far.
Then about ‘Kieskringen’ , which means regions in which this party can be elected. The protocol of the Kiesraad (see web) states that they did not have enough declarations of support in many regions (and large cities). Only in about half of the 20 regions (including nr. 20 – Bonaire, Statia, Saba) there were enough support declarations to participate in the elections. For every Kieskring in which a party wants to participate only 30 support declarations are needed, and for the BES-region only 10! It says something if not all regions had enough supporters! We are talking about a few hunderd supporters that could not be found! You need a lot more in the elections!
There are 3 Statian candidates on this list, but on ineligible rank numbers, as the election quota, that is the number of votes necessary for one membership of the House of Parliament, is 70.000 votes. Even in the number 20 elections region in 2017 there were only 3,452 votes (including not valid and blank votes).
You could say that the Statian candidates are on the list only to collect votes for the number one on the list.
But why should you consider this? Although the leader, Regillio Vaarnold, has his heart in the right place, and many things he has said and done are pretty okay, the program of the party is quite racially backgrounded, which is not good for results in elections, and that goes in general for all colors. Taking a hitchhike on the Black Lives Matter movement is a kind of body snatching that is not done! The rest of this program is sometimes pretty vague: ‘Met Connected benadrukken wij onze verbinding met het universum en de (circulaire)synergie van de verbinding met de specifieke geschiedenissen van alle burgergemeenschappen in Nederland’. Yep, that’s what the program said.
To compare something: in 2017 Koos Sneek tried to get votes also, but as some investigators could have predicted, only 385 people voted for him. Although these votes were almost half of the votes on the BES-islands for the CDA party, 385 votes is a big difference to 70,000 votes! The 115,000 euros plus, are possibly teasing, but you need more support for that goal.