What Does Accountability Mean?

April 25-2009:

What Does Accountability Mean?

Definition:

* Responsibility to someone or for some activity:

Keeping the above definition in mind, please indulge me in a discourse that should take us to the point where we will understand our individual responsibilities, and accountability.

It is our parent/s responsibility to care, protect, educate, feed, clothes and house their offspring, from childbirth, until they are equipped with the ability to take care of basic personal needs. In some cultures that responsibility commences at the tender age of 13. In other cultures it may be 16-17-18 or 21 years of age.

Children are supposed to understand their role and responsibilities in the family, the community at large, and the state in which they live or call their home. In modern, developing and developed societies, this duty is exercised in the form of politicking, voting, demonstrating, agitating, and dissent. The commonweal is expected to hold their leaders accountable for any action/s that contravene the laws, the general rules of conduct, the credibility of the position they occupy, and the role/s they play for those who aspire to that position/s, and to the younger people of that culture.

For example, here in the USA, the political representatives in Congress, the Senate, and the White House, are accountable to the American people, regardless of who voted or did not vote at elections. Whatever actions, laws, or decisions taken in Congress, The Senate, or The White House, affects all Americans directly or indirectly, in their everyday lives.

Those elected representatives who are appointed as Ambassadors to foreign countries, is an extension of ourselves in those countries. And they too are responsible indirectly to the American people, via the President who would have appointed them as ambassadors.

So telling yourself that 'I am not responsible' for what American soldiers, Ambassadors, Elected officials, or The President does abroad, is shirking our responsibility as citizens, or just plain ignorant of our civic duties.

Every citizen of every country is expected to be concerned with the manner in which the country is administered, and by whom. It is also their responsibility to agitate for the right to decide who administers that country, how it is managed, and who they elected or chosen representatives should be. It is also the duty of every citizen to vote, or agitate for some form of election process, to determine how, when, where, and how this process is conducted.

It is also the responsibility of all citizens to have access to their elected officials. To ensure that there is a process in place for lobbying, on issues that they (the constituents) feel, ought to be given particular attention by their elected representatives.

And finally, it is the duty of all citizens to participate in the electoral process, by registering to vote, encouraging others to register and vote. And to remove via the ballot, any representative/s whom they feel does not address adequately, or seem to have abandoned their responsibilities to the electorate.

Derryck S. Griffith.
Educator-Advocate & Blogger.
http://my.opera.com/BringBaka/
http://www.myspace.com/derryck_mimbari