Peter Espeut | Our democracy is not working

The word democracy comes from two Greek words: ‘demos’, which means ‘the people’ or ‘the citizenry’ or ‘civil society’; and ‘kratos’, which means ‘to rule’ or ‘to hold’ or ‘to grasp’. Hence the focus is on ‘rule by the people’, and not on the power exercised by those who ‘rule the people’. It was Abraham Lincoln, 14th president of the United States who famously said in his Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, that democracy was ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

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