Christian Mota
Christian Mota
Next Sunday, February 27, the Dominican Republic will celebrate one more year of being independent, thanks to Juan Pablo Duarte, Matias Ramon Mella, and Francisco Del Rosario Sanchez, who, together with brave men and women, managed to give us the nationality, that night of 1844.
One hundred seventy-eight years of history has been governed by 67 presidents, from Pedro Santana, who was invested in November 1844 by decision of the Central Governing Board, to the current one, Luis Abinader, sworn in on August 16, 2020.
We have made progress because, like most Latin American countries, we have had to go through several processes of dictators such as Ulises Heureaux (Lilís) and Rafael Leónidas Trujillo as a young nation.
Today, the country has lived a democracy since May 30, 1961, with the execution of Trujillo, but to reach the level of development that nations of thousands of years have, we lack the will of the State.
Our Dominican Republic must start with being a more cooperative society with the State; we know that a country must supply its citizens with essential public policies, such as health, education, and security.
But do citizens contribute to the State having these guarantees?
When the proportion of formally employed people in the Dominican labor market reached 42.3%, and the ratio of informally employed people reached 57.7%, that is to say, we have to improve in this aspect.
If we have the will to make it possible to contribute to the State, I believe that we can demand more from our rulers because, as a society, we would be overseers of our budget expenditures.
It is evident that we still have a long way to go to be an advanced society, but if businessmen and politicians start with these changes, I think that, in the long term, we will reach these goals.
When society understands that contributing to the State with taxes makes us more independent and, at the same time, observers of the expenses and critics of public investments, we have advanced as a society. However, we still have a long way to go, we are a young nation, and we must mature so that development can reach us.