A number of YesTT's proposals for increasing accountability in governance make sense. Or at the very least help trigger welcome debate and deliberation about a better way forward than the current model.

But the dominance of referendum and right of recall in the YesTT platform troubles me. Those elements are what I associate most with the kind of mob democracy that we've seen on such ugly display in the US. And there, like here, they raise real questions about how democracies protect minority rights from majoritarian abuse. The very things that proportional representation is meant to foster, a referendum culture takes away.

No measure to support minority rights and concerns can withstand a majority referendum. Religious freedom, sexual minority rights are under serious threat, especially since we never developed a robust culture of individual or minority rights post colonization.

I'm truly afraid of referenda that do what's happening in Africa right now: criminalize unpopular sexualities, blur boundaries between secularism and dogma by putting God all over government. Those will pass by referendum in a minute.

There's something to be said for parliamentary systems that allow for indirect representation and rational debate and, especially when elected by proportional representation, the balancing of interests.

Right of recall, similarly, is prone to mob governance. The winds blow and we get up one morning, ketch a vapse and recall a politician. It makes it all the less likely that politicians will take brave, visionary stands and we are left with governance by opinion poll. We are not a very mature democracy but the fact that we are small means we can influence governance in some very intimate ways without needing those two sledgehammers as voters. I worry that we not only don't need them, but we would not wield them very gracefully.

As someone who fears strongly that the rights of gay people, non-monotheists and anyone with alternative practices would be badly damaged by either mechanism, I can't get behind either. I don't think we have the political maturity, frankly, to handle either well. I think the real work of strengthening governance lies in grassroots work of building LOCAL mechanisms for citizen participation and decisionmaking. That's what the tyre burning is trying to get at. It's about how we channel the local initiative of tyre burning into some other kind of LOCALLY relevant process. It's not about some Swiss structural prescriptions. I think the referendum process takes a certain kind of popular engagement out of the democratic process. It's vulnerable to corruption and patronage. And to all sorts of financing by interest groups. We need something more homegrown.

What we need is to take these ideas (and others) to the people and encourage debate. Allow comments on your videos. Look for solutions to increasing democracy at the grassroots, not just among the educated and elite. Listen; don't just brodcast.