YOUNG Jamaicans are being encouraged by their peers in politics to exercise their franchise on election day, September 3.

At a Gleaner Editors' Forum last week, members of the People's National Party affiliates - the PNPYO and the Patriots - along with members of the Jamaica Labour Party's (JLP) Generation 2000 said young Jamaicans should help decide their future by utilising the right to vote.

"We owe it to ourselves to get involved. We have a duty to make our voices heard ... women and children alike should get involved," Dionne McCoy, vice-president of the G2K, said during the forum, held at the newspaper's North Street, central Kingston offices last week.

Target collectively

Similarly Colin Virgo, general-secretary of the G2K, said the political parties "need to collectively target not only in the interests of democracy, but also in the national interest, young people need to get involved in politics."

He added: "We cannot afford to develop a country in a state where a small portion of persons are going to continuously decide for everybody else who is going to form the government, because it is something that affects all of us."

The young Labourites were not singing a party song as Raymond Price, chairman of the Patriots and Andrew Okola, PNPYO president, also said the role of youths in the electoral process was important to governance.

"There is a perception that young people do not want to be involved in the political process," Mr. Okola said. He highlighted the feeling of mistrust of the political system as being a chief reason for persons staying away from politics.

Virgo added that many young persons stay away from politics because they believe that it is an "awful dirty thing".

He said: "It is one of my greatest concerns right now, the relatively high number of persons who believe they are helping the system by abandoning it."