Former Archon Transition Team (ATT) member Blandine Okapi is taking some heat for her most recent remarks about sortition and the annual selection of government in The Park.
In an op-ed piece published in The Ruminant Free Press yesterday, Okapi calls the process of sortition, which has been the only method used to select The Park’s 35 Archons, “a ridiculous idea” and says bluntly, “All it does is give us a coalition of the unwilling and unable.”
Okapi, who quit the ATT two years ago in order to work with the Coalition Against Sortition in The Park (CASP), claims she is drawing from her experience in politics and government when she says that sortition is “keeping The Park in a state of inertia.”
“As we look forward this year to celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of zoocracy, we have to ask ourselves what we’ve accomplished here,” she writes. “If our goal was to mature as a Park and to be the model for Animal self-government everywhere, I would say we have failed miserably.”
Reaction to Okapi’s scathing criticism has been swift. At a joint press conference this morning, 2014 Chief Archon Buckminster Moose and Sylvana Rana, president of Save Our Political System (SOPS), countered her arguments, saying that sortition is the best method available to ensure fair and equitable representation in government.
Former Chief Archon Moose went on to speak of his experience in governing The Park:
“I unequivocally dispute Okapi’s portrait of the members of our governments as being either unable or unwilling or both. During my term as Chief Archon, I worked with some of the most able Animals I have ever met and every one of them was one hundred percent committed to zoocracy and to the values that Jor stood for,” he said.
