Once the victory celebrations are over (I hope they don’t take too long), the new government will be facing a packed agenda. Beyond the promises that will have been made and the expectations which the election campaign – like all other campaigns – has unleashed, there will loom issues of extremely high importance which the government must address.
Some of the arising matters will not be under the government’s control. Still, it will have to find a a suitable response to issues that will arise, practically all at the same time. Decisions which the government will take shall have long term consequences whose outcome cannot be taken for granted. They could be of major benefit to our people, but equally, if badly directed, they could be very detrimental to the future of the country as a whole.
Among the outstanding issues one finds: the islands’ economic structures; the environment; education; transport; energy; governance; the fight against corruption; social inequalities and poverty; immigration; neutrality and security as they relate to our position in Europe.
Evidently, these pose enormous challenges. However the government again benefits from a strong base of political capital as it tries to defuse them. It has to do so transparently, competently, with straightforwardness and strict attention to where the interests of the common citizens lie.
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WAR
Putin’s war in the Ukraine has turned completely outside down the ways by which we used to think about the future and wonder what it could be like. For I do not know how many decades, our ideas about the future were conditioned by everyday worries concerning inflation, unemployment and its increase, what to buy and how to sell.
No longer. The possibility that war could just light up all of a sudden and without control has suddenly become an integral part of how we consider life. To make matters worse, chances that a nuclear standoff could ensue seem to be coming closer.
The greatest war tension that individuals of my generation can remember happened in the beginning fo the 1960’s, when the US made a stand against what they alleged was the transfer to Cuba of nuclear warheads. Then, the crisis did not end up in war. Many believed this could very well have happened.
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HUNGER IN AFRICA
From the prairies of Rumania and the Ukraine (plus Russia), as the harvests were wound up, grain would leave for Europe and also Africa. The last harvest was apparently somewhat badly impacted by drought. With the Ukraine war, trade flows have been disrupted.
Grain supplies are bound to greatly decline. To make matters worse, if fertilisers are lacking, grain output will stagnate. However a major supplier of fertilisers happens to be a factory in Ukraine which has been out of action because of the war.
The drop in the volume of grains arriving from the harvests will have a knock on effect on exports. African countries will be the most badly affected, from north to south of the Sahara. Some observers are already envisaging and worrying about the spread of hunger across the African continent.
It is in the interests of nobody to claim that this is a problem we can ignore, since it does not affect us; somebody else has to deal with it. Quite naturally, when hungry, peoples suffering it will travel in a quest to find other places in the world where they can at least live by finding what to eat.