Historians tell us that in 1935 only about 66,000 Jamaicans had the right to vote — eligibility was limited to income-earning, tax-paying property owners.

Jamaican women — economically well off and tax-paying property owners — only became eligible to vote in 1919.

Just over 90 years earlier, in 1830/31, free mixed race men, referred to as mulattoes, free black men, and Jews — all of whom had to meet aforementioned economic thresholds — were granted the right to vote.

Before then, after British colonisers chased out the Spanish and took control of Jamaica in the 1650s, only those designated as white male property owners, numbering a few thousand at most, had the right to vote in Jamaica.

After much struggle, bloodshed, and trauma, the great majority of Jamaicans — mostly descendants of enslaved Africans who had been kidnapped and transported across the Atlantic in chains — secured the right to vote with the declaration of universal adult suffrage in 1944.

That’s when, for the very first time, adult Jamaicans became eligible to elect their political representatives regardless of economic circumstance, race, colour, gender, or literacy.

Jamaica was, in fact, the first British Colony with a population of predominantly “dark-skinned” people to gain that right.

Today, 80 years later, only the very oldest still among us can directly relate to the strange, yet liberating feeling this universal right to vote must have triggered.

Nowadays, Jamaicans take it for granted.

We suspect that thoughts along the lines outlined above, partly motivated former Prime Minister Mr P J Patterson’s suggestion that current worrying voter apathy results, to some degree, from our people’s ignorance of their past.

“We are not being taught enough about ourselves; who we are, the struggles we have undertaken, and really giving some sense of purpose and, I would almost say, of value,” Mr Patterson is reported by this newspaper as saying.

We agree with the view that democracy, as Jamaicans have known it since the 1940s, is now under threat because of that ever-accelerating disinterest in the electoral process.

Clearly, greater knowledge of where we are coming from as a people is a must.

But also, in an increasingly materialistic world, driven by unprecedentedly rapid-evolving technologies, many — not just in Jamaica, but globally — see much more relevance in the advancement of self, rather than community or country.

It seems clear that historical knowledge imparted in all available fora must be integrated with the here and now. Crucially, young people should be encouraged to see the link between collective (political) action and solving immediate, serious problems, such as crime, for example.

Unfortunately, far too many attempts at collective problem-solving are undermined by vulgar, politically partisan behaviour. There is a growing sense that the very adversarial political leadership class is dishonest, corrupt, manipulative, and predominantly self-serving.

Hence, for many, the electoral processes which should assist the advancement of society become purely “a spectator sport” as described by Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ) Chairman Mr Earl Jarrett.

We believe that for political activity and electoral processes to regain widespread respect beyond diehard political partisans, there must be a conscious change by our two main political parties, their leaders, and representatives.

Up ahead, Jamaicans will have to be convinced that at long last our politicians are putting country first.