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Asking the right questions
October 09, 2001
By Denis Solomon
The following is an edited version of Denis Solomon's contribution to a panel discussion on "The Way Forward" organised by the Constitutional Reform Committee at OWTU Headquarters, San Fernando, on Saturday, October 13, 2001.
I'd like to begin by telling you a joke.
Basdeo Panday goes to a bank to cash a cheque for US $50,000.
Teller: May I see some ID, please?
BP: You mad or what? I is de Prime Minister! Everybody know me.
Teller: Sorry, sir, but no cheques can be cashed without identification.
BP: But I does be on TV whole time, making speech! And you ain't see all me bodyguard and ting? Man, cash de damn cheque before I get vex.
Teller: Sorry, sir, everybody has to prove his identity. Last week Dwight Yorke was in here without his passport, and we had to get a football and make him keep it up in the air for an hour before we would cash his cheque.
But that gives me an idea. Perhaps you could say something to prove you are the Prime Minister.
BP: OK, OK-er-ah-er- Oh God, all I could think of to say is chupidness!
Teller: How do you want the money, Mr Panday?
So much for jokes. Now to serious business. This discussion is on "the way forward". In the narrow sense, the way forward is anybody's guess. We all know the facts: The President has acceded to Mr Panday's call for an election, the UNC is split, at least half the country doesn't trust the electoral lists, and four seats are still in dispute from the last election.
I would like to discuss the way forward in a broader, longer-term sense.
This boils down to one important question: to what extent has the present crisis resulted in our maturation, our learning, our liberation?
For that is what learning is—not training, not memorisation of facts, but liberation. Liberation from shibboleths, liberation of our powers of independent judgment.
In terms of learning, one thing is staring us in the face: that the answers to the crisis, if there are answers, are not to be found in the Constitution. We have seen the parade of lawyers trotted out by both sides.
Whatever the outcome, one side will claim that Constitutional principles have been preserved; the other will claim they have been infringed.
In that regard, let me draw your attention to a full-page advertisement in the Sunday Mirror. It is headed "Let the People Decide", and quotes an English QC in support of an election. Apart from the arrogance of telling people what they want ("That is what the people want"), the advertisement is a blatant abuse of the office of the Attorney General, because she is using public funds to advance a party political position. In fact, half of a party political position. Yet there is no law that says the Attorney General may not take out newspaper advertisements. This is precisely why this advertisement is completely unethical and corrupt. For corruption is not always about money. It is also about abuse of office and about cynically bamboozling the public.
But Kamla's attempts at bamboozlement will not succeed, as long as we have become mature enough to see through this kind of cynicism. And I think that that is what is happening—we are learning that laws and constitutions must reflect our political attitudes and practices. Otherwise they simply provide fuel for legal sophistry. To illustrate this, I deliberately indulged in some sophistry of my own in my last article in the Express, in which I set out to prove that the Constitution forbids the Prime Minister to resign!
A lot of people have been discovering of late that our Constitution is authoritarian. That it was written by an authoritarian, Ellis Clarke, for an authoritarian, Eric Williams. Of course it was. But the reason it took us so long to find out is that it suited our own authoritarian attitudes, inherited from our colonial past. The only sense in which this country is a republic is that the Queen of England is not the Head of State. In every other respect we have lacked the basic element of republicanism: the spirit of watchful optimism, of refusal to depend on gods and father-figures to manage our destiny. Our blind belief in the authority of texts is of a par with our desperate need for religion. I would like to think that we are now ridding ourselves of this incubus, and learning not to treat the Constitution as an immutable gospel, but rather as the record at any given moment of an ongoing dialogue between the people and the State, a social contract subject to continuing refinement, gaining respect and obedience to the extent that it is recognised as such.
Lloyd Best never tires of saying that Constitutions are reformed only when there is no longer any need for it. I don't entirely agree. We must have a Constitution, and it must say something. I never tire of saying that a people is in the same relationship to a Constitution as an organism is to its environment. This is a dialectical relationship: the environment of the Constitution operates upon us to influence our political attitudes, but as we evolve, we operate on it to bring it into synch with political reality.
So let us talk not about Constitution, but about institutions. I think the evolution in ourselves produced by this crisis is to be seen in the progressive refinement of the questions we are asking. Questions about the executive and its powers are a good example. At the lowest level, we start by asking questions like "Does the President/Prime Minster have the power to do X or Y?" (regardless of the fact that he may have already done it). We then progress to questions such as "What is the role of the President in our Constitution?" and "Do we need an executive President?"
These three types of questions are precisely the area in which the politicians can wash they foot and jump in, because they perceive that false answers to false questions can be manipulated to their advantage. The phrase "executive President" has been batted around from time to time by both the PNM and the UNC, each of them obviously anxious to put its own spin on it, as politicians can do with any term empty of real meaning.
The real question that we must ask in this regard, once we start thinking about institutions instead of Constitutions, is "What is the most desirable relationship, for our purposes, between the executive and the legislature, in other words between government and people, or between management and shareholders, if you want a metaphor from business.
The answers to questions like this are never set in stone. They are also the questions that our politicians never ask, because the answers, whatever they turn out to be, are certain to imply a diminution of the unchallenged authority on the one hand, and blind obedience on the other, that is the only polity their colonial mentality can embrace.
• To be continued next week
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon