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Immunisation Campaign
October 14, 2001
By Denis Solomon
MR PANDAY has won the round. By playing the election card he has converted the President from potential defender of parliamentary democracy and guardian of the nation against political and electoral corruption, into a supplicant, asking Mr Panday to "stay his advice", and thereby confirming his legitimacy as Prime Minister.
Legal opinions and constitutional precedents are totally irrelevant to the present situation. It is always possible to find lawyers who will defend either side of an argument at the drop of a hat. That is their job. Ramesh Maharaj in particular is a past master at drumming up eminent legal support for dubious ends. After all, he has spent the last six years doing it on Mr Panday's behalf, most recently in the quarrel with the President over senatorial appointments. And with public funds to boot.
This alone should be enough to convince the public that the parade of lawyers trotted out by both sides must be totally ignored. It should also have been enough to persuade the President to take his courage in both hands and dump Mr Panday before Mr Panday could move the battle to the ground of his own choosing.
Even for those to whom legal opinions matter, the President is now in a weaker position. If constitutional arguments had any validity, there were far more of them in favour of a President firing a minority government than there are now in favour of a President denying or delaying an election.
The President's pusillanimity is of a piece with the cowardice of the judges who in 1990 failed to take the thinly-disguised advice of the Privy Council and keep the Muslimeen locked up, on the grounds that the amnesty was extracted under duress. By all means, I said at the time, let them appeal the decision, but make sure they do it from jail. By the same token, firing the Panday government would have deprived Mr Panday of the advantage of prime ministerial prestige and influence in his campaign of intimidation and incitement.
Mr Panday has also upstaged Mr Manning, whose references to elections have been limited to refusing them. For the irony is that Mr Panday is right. The people must decide. The question is when, and on what. Instead of asking to be made Prime Minister so that he could appoint a Commission of Enquiry into the EBC, Mr Manning should have acknowledged that a government that depended on a court decision for two of its seats must seek public confirmation of its mandate at the earliest opportunity.
Mr Manning ought to have pledged, first of all, to ensure clean electoral lists, and then to go to the polls with a plan for the country, perhaps including electoral and maybe even constitutional reform. In support of this he might have pointed out that even without the three musketeers the support of Nathaniel Moore gave him a majority. As for the fact of having a minority of the popular vote, this would no longer be true, regardless of the Gypsy-Chaitan affair, if he were joined by the three musketeers: they, after all, were elected.
This argument would admittedly have been hard to get across to people who are still stuck in the mentality that gives primacy to something called a "party" over the principles of popular representation and parliamentary alignment. The President himself may be one such, despite the fact that it was an alignment with him that put Panday in power in the first place. Mr Manning certainly is: he has a debt of a million dollars to prove it, and he is on record as saying that if he came to office he would beef up the crossing-the-floor act "within seconds".
I call the President's reluctance to fire Panday pusillanimous not only because Mr Robinson failed to put his money where his mouth was and follow the spirit rather than the (supposed) letter of the Constitution, but because he may also have been influenced by fear of what might happen if Mr Panday refused to move and his supporters took to the streets. There was little danger of that. People know on what side their bread is buttered. If Mr Panday had had to continue his campaign of incitement without the trappings of office, his so-called supporters might well have deserted in droves, as the Taliban fighters are said to be doing at this moment in Afghanistan. In fact, judging by the lukewarm applause his diatribes got at the Rienzi Complex and in Freeport, the campaign is not as successful as he would like even now.
As for Mr Panday refusing to move, I think that not even he would have been crazy enough to put himself in that ridiculous position. But even if he wanted to, he had two recent foreign precedents to discourage him. The former President of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, refused to quit after Parliament impeached him. So his successor, Megawati Sukarnoputri, simply left him in the presidential palace until he got tired, packed up his traps and moved out. In the Philippines, former President Joseph Estrada was forced out of office by the imminence of parliamentary defeat, but when last heard of was still trying to whip up the fury of his grassroots supporters, to no effect. The analogy is even more striking in that Mr Estrada tried to solve his problems by means of a snap election, but was forced by mounting public pressure to abandon the idea and resign instead.
Besides, against whom would the fury of Mr Panday's militant supporters have been directed? I don't see them mounting a riot in the streets of Port of Spain, attacking President's House or setting fire to the Red House. Their fury is an intra-UNC fury. The only likely targets are the neemakharams, and the thought of Ramesh Maharaj's life being under threat leaves me, for one, indifferent.
By the same token, Mr Panday faces a battle, even before the election, to recreate the UNC in his own image, under the name of the United (ha!) National Party, with all that that entails as regards the selection and credentials of candidates. So even fighting on a battlefield of his own making doesn't guarantee him victory.
Please don't think that my obvious desire to see the back of Mr Panday indicates any desire to see the front of Mr Manning, especially alongside Ramesh Maharaj. But firing the Panday government would at least have been a step away from the politics of blind party (i.e. ethnic) loyalties, a step that would have had to be confirmed by a shift in behaviour on the part of the population.
Perhaps, though, Mr Robinson's inertia was not pusillanimity after all. Maybe he listened to Lloyd Best's rhetorical question as to whether the President had the right to protect us against ourselves, that is, to temporarily halt the country's progress to more rapid, if more painful, resolution than firing Panday would have provided.
The Italian elections in May this year brought to power Silvio Berlusconi, a man whose dubious business background raised alarm in all the countries of the European Union. Before the election, one of Berlusconi's sternest critics, the elder statesman of Italian journalism Indro Montanelli, was asked what result he would like to see. "I would like Berlusconi to win" he said. "But why, if you have been so critical of him?" the interviewer asked. "Because", said Montanelli, "Berlusconi is a disease that can only be cured by vaccination. Italy needs a good injection of Berlusconi in order to be cured of him and his like".
Manning could certainly not cure us of Panday, any more than Panday cured us of Manning in 1995. Let us hope that the treatment we are now undergoing will provide the immunisation we need to the kind of political disease of which they are both symptoms.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon