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Stable crisis
December 17, 2000
By Denis Solomon
LAST Wednesday Sir Ellis Clarke informed the BBC that whichever way the impasse over the two contested Parliamentary seats is resolved, “there might be some discomfort, some unease, but there certainly wouldn’t be a crisis”.
Well, I have news for him. There already is a crisis.
Consider the facts. After nominations are closed, two UNC candidates are accused of having held voluntarily acquired citizenship of foreign countries when registering, and therefore of making false declarations on their registration forms. They do not deny the dual citizenship, but deny making false declarations.
The PNM announces that whatever the result of the election, petitions will be brought to the courts asking for the disqualification of the candidates. The voters are informed of this by newspaper advertisements and notices distributed to all electors, warning them that any votes for those two candidates will be wasted.
The two candidates receive the greatest number of votes in their constituencies, and the petitions are duly brought.
If both petitions are upheld, the UNC’s 19-16 majority will be reversed, and the PNM will have a majority of 18-17, with one seat going to the NAR.
The situation as of now, therefore, is that no one knows whether the President will feel able to call on anyone to form a government, given the closeness of the result and the almost certain invalidity of the results in the two constituencies. If he calls on Panday and the petitions are upheld, he is going to have to revoke the appointment in favour of Manning. If only one is upheld, the UNC will have a majority of one, giving the NAR the chance of either reinforcing that majority or forcing a stalemate and probably a new election.
A grotesque, but not entirely unimaginable, possibility is that the NAR MP would “do a James Mitchell”—align himself with the UNC in exchange for becoming Prime Minister. In which case we would find ourselves under the leadership of Prime Minister Nathaniel Moore.
Whichever party ends up in office, there will be bad feeling on the other side. If it is the PNM, the UNC can scream that the will of the people has been frustrated by a legal technicality. (The UNC got a clear overall majority of the popular vote). The reaction of UNC supporters is likely to go well beyond the “discomfort” predicted by Sir Ellis. The tendency of Mr Panday to urge violence on his supporters is too well-known for that possibility to be discounted. If the UNC takes office, the PNM can scream that the UNC’s well-known contempt for the law has put it illegitimately in power.
It has been said that one possibility is for the courts to declare the results invalid and order a by-election. This is said to depend on whether the judges decide that the electors were sufficiently warned of the possible invalidity of their votes. To my un-legal mind, it would also be an expensive way of allowing the UNC to profit from its dishonesty, since the UNC would probably win the seats again.
Parallel to the election petition, there is a police investigation of the allegedly false declarations. So that even if the two UNC candidates are confirmed in their seats, they might lose them after all if they are jailed for perjury.
This is what Sir Ellis Clarke says is not a crisis.
In fact, the crisis has been brewing ever since Independence, when we failed to adopt constitutional arrangements sufficiently imaginative to diminish our tendency to racial politics, curb caudillismo and make Parliamentary opposition an honourable condition instead of a badge of infamy. The only way to have avoided the current manifestation of the crisis would have been for the PNM to do what I suggested in an earlier column: acknowledge the conflict between the citizenship laws and Parliamentary eligibility as an anomaly, and announce in advance that it would not contest the two results.
My point was that there were two realities, the legal reality of voluntarily acquired foreign nationality being an impediment to membership of Parliament, and the political reality of the attitudes and preferences of Trinidad and Tobago voters.
The average voter in Trinidad and Tobago couldn’t care less about dual citizenship. Most people even view it as an advantage, a sign of enterprise. This is a country of emigrants. Half the PNM lines up daily outside the United States Embassy in search of green cards, and half the UNC is in Canada trying to get refugee status. Why should they reject Gypsy and Chaitan for having succeeded? As far as false declarations are concerned, since when has lying been a political disadvantage? Think of the whoppers the Prime Minister has told over the last five years. Remember, too, that ninety per cent of people polled in a television survey believed that all politicians are corrupt. This view can only be reinforced when they see the President of the United States lying under oath, and the President of Peru using his Japanese citizenship to escape the consequences of his conduct in office. If dem could play, who is we?
Even Sir Ellis Clarke, while telling the BBC there will be no crisis, seems to recognise at least the imminence of one in his statements to the local media. He told the Express that in his discussions with President Robinson and former President Noor Hassanali, the issue of whether or not the country should continue to function under the British model was discussed. “More and more we are realising that the Westminster system is not one we should follow slavishly, and an adjustment has to be made,” he said.
But apart from the fact that our constitution is not the Westminster model but a cynically twisted simulacrum of it, the question is, who are “we”? The spectacle of Sir Ellis emerging from a summit meeting and proclaiming the need for Constitutional adjustments is a perfect example of the authoritarian approach that has characterised both the content of our Constitutions and successive attempts to reform them.
If, however, by “we” Sir Ellis means (which I strongly doubt) “the population of Trinidad and Tobago”, then he is putting his finger on the real root of the crisis. For the next five years there will be bitterness and hatred whatever happens; and in future elections there will never again be a clear-cut majority for any government.
But the Indo-Trinidadian population, having lived for thirty years under a Constitution which they will see, rightly or wrongly, as the source of their exclusion from government, will not take kindly to the idea of changing it now that it has finally brought them to power. And they will attribute Sir Ellis’ suggestion to a desire to close the door of the Afro stable now the Indo horse has escaped.
Copyright © Denis Solomon
