Leaders and politics

By Bukka Rennie
August 13, 2003

Why are leaders so afraid of politics and political discourse? "Politics" has become today a "dirty" word. You hear people saying over and over that they wish to have nothing to do with "politics". But how can this be?

Politics is the art and science of governance, it is about the administrating of public affairs, it is about service in the interest of people’s development and welfare and is supposed to be conducted with the strictest of principles. How can such an engagement be ever considered dirty?

In our view the process of discrediting of such a noble engagement began with the question of specialisation. With the rapid increases of populations around the world and with it the rapid development of the technological base of human existence, new complexities arose within the ambit of production, distribution, consumption of things and moreso the reproduction of these processes as means towards guaranteeing that there is never ever scarcity of all the means of livelihood such as food and clothing.

With these new complexities came the demand for specialised knowledge and highly specialised technical know-how. Specialisation resulted in a form of elitism based on information that was or could be acquired by smaller and smaller numbers of people.

Once specialisation came to pervade every aspect of existence, certain people chose to make "politics" their specialised profession as opposed to the original Greek concept of a "polis" and a "body politic" that engaged the insights and wisdom of the whole community, the city state.

Once the professional politician appeared it stands to reason that the process of selection, the election, the most insignificant aspect of this civic engagement, would be made to become the "be-all and end-all", the "raison d’etre," of this once noble activity. It is this that has come to be the dirty word today.

Individuals spend their entire adult life contesting and preparing to contest elections. They expend untold energy and huge sums of money charming their way into people’s consciousness with promises of the "moon and the stars" with the hope thereby to clinch their votes on the day.

The corruption and immorality that pervades the exercise is astounding. The least consideration in this context is the preparing of oneself to appropriately debate and have discourse on the issues of the day; to expose, reveal and explain the ideological tendencies of the epoch in order to intelligently inform the planning decisions of the day.

Once politics signified sagaciousness and visioneering, today it is merely about electioneering with any kind of pick-up side that is available and "boldface" enough. That is what is immoral and dirty.

Panday’s tragedy is a classic case of a politician who refused to see the bigger picture, who refused to accept the demands of the times, who accepted to remain "ordinary", a mere electioneering politician rather than become a statesman of the time.

In this space we warned Panday and his UNC that it was their one single historic mission to transform the sugar industry, just as it was the mission of the PNM to create a modern nation State.

We indicated that the transformation and break-up of the sugar industry, in which Caribbean civilisation began and in which it was formalised, had to signal a whole new departure beginning with land reform on a nationwide scale.

But Panday kept seeing only the numbers game, seeing sugar workers only as potential voters, and not as human beings best placed by history to launch a process for national transformation.

Panday is paying today for his lack of foresight and vision and for his failure to be democratic in practice, for his failure to consult with and confide in his people.

There is talk now about the need for another party. Let all likely candidates be forewarned. Too many people today are of the view that all that is necessary is for a group of some intellectuals, some doctors and lawyers, to come together, form a party, elect a chairman, write a manifesto and go and read it in Woodford Square or Rienzi Complex and ask people to vote for you because you have the answers to all their problems.

If that is the view of those on the right, then the views of the left is no different.

The leftists and trade unionists say, call out "the best sons and daughters of the working-class, appoint a general secretary and a central committee, declare a party based on democratic-centralism to raise consciousness of the masses and engage them against the powers that be.

Party of the right, party of the left or party of the centre, same khaki pants, the approach is the same. A party is an elitist structure by definition. It is a minority.

It is an organisation of leaders, an organisation of representatives of the people that, in each historic case, is quickly transformed into its opposite, becomes incestuous and can only represent itself.

Hence the reason why the party, especially when it achieves power, so quickly becomes devoid of "politics" in the real sense of the word.

We must cease being deluded by what a party is. It is what it is. We must accept that and when we do we will realise that the party is nothing without the mass movement of people organised everywhere in their communities and work-places. The only task of the party therefore is to bring into being and nurture the organised mass movement.

The party, like all separate leadership structures, is only a means to an end; the party is not an end in itself, it is a strategic appendage to the masses of people in their organised communities, the real "body politic".

A mass party is and has always been a nonsense concept. Let everybody be forewarned.