Trinidad Express
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Breathing space
January 31, 2001
By Denis Solomon
I DON'T think there is any doubt that the Constitutional impasse is putting the population into a learning mode. People are being forced to ask themselves some fundamental questions about how politics is conducted, or not conducted, in Trinidad and Tobago. The media are helping enormously.
But I don't think the real breakthrough has come yet. The argument is still being carried on on the basis of whether the President "can" or "can't" do what he has already done. The supporters of each position seek to show that they have "legality" on their side. Letters to the newspapers say either that the President is subverting the Constitution or that Ramesh should talk about Gypsy and Chaitan before he talks about Robinson. Ramesh himself bombards the President with opinions from eminent (and expensive) jurists to prove that you can't use the Preamble of the Constitution to justify disobeying an operative section of it.
A moment's thought will show that this kind of discussion is otiose. If someone has done something, it is absurd to say that he can't; to say that he can is redundant.
A slightly refined version of the debate takes the form of wondering whether the President can be persuaded to change his mind, or to compromise. Keith Smith put forward a version of this in his Express column last Monday. The President, he says, has a responsibility to tell us where he disagrees with the legal arguments the Attorney General has put to him. This, Keith hopes, will make it possible to "conclude this section of the discussion and move on to the next", which is a debate on what changes we have to make in the Constitution.
Keith seems not to realise two things. The first is that progress will come not from concluding a phase in the dispute but from failing to conclude it. There are no phases. The situation must continue until it is so intolerable that there remains no alternative but an alteration in the consciousness of the population as a whole, or a sufficiently large part of it. Not the consciousness of Robinson, Panday, Manning or Maharaj. These are dinosaurs, obsolete figures kept in place only because the population hasn't yet developed enough clarity of thought to get rid of them.
The second thing is that the President has already answered Keith's question as to why he disagrees with the legal opinions. First of all, he has answered it by the inconsistency of his statements. Anxious to avoid giving an impression of arrogance, he declared himself subject to "correction" by rational arguments. But the grounds he gave for his decision were not rational but emotional, not legal but ideological. They amounted to nothing less than his interpretation of the nature of democracy, and his judgment that a certain course of action would be incompatible with it. Along with his references to the principles enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution, he was careful to say that laws cannot cover everything. The clear implication was that if the sections of the Constitution in question mandated such a course of action, they were to that extent undemocratic and must be disobeyed.
There can be no question, therefore, of any "rational" or "legal" counter-arguments for the President to agree or disagree with.
The President also answered Keith's question explicitly, when he exhorted his listeners not to rely on lawyers but to make up their own minds. "You are the public," he said. "It is for you to decide what you want".
So the legal arguments with which Ramesh is inundating the President have nothing to do with the case. They are as irrelevant as the accusations and counter-accusations flung around in a succession of press conferences by Panday, Robinson and Ramesh, about whether the Prime Minister infringed the Standing Orders of Parliament, or accused the President of conspiracy, or whether the President played host to an illegal demonstration by receiving Selwyn Cudjoe's petition.
Keith's question also finds an answer in the character of the two protagonists. They (and Manning too) are epitomes of winner-take-all politics in which compromise is never an option. If it were not so, compromise would already have been reached. Furthermore, their individual characters are against it. Panday is aggressive, volatile, erratic and insecure. Robinson is vain, proud of his (largely self-conferred) role of elder statesman and archetypal father of the nation. Besides, he has already backed down twice: once over the Commission of Enquiry into the Administration of Justice, and once over the Tobago Senators. He has obviously chosen the present issue as the point beyond which he will retreat no more.
The issue is not a legal but a political one, and new politics cannot be ushered in by the representatives and beneficiaries of the old.
By the same token, the solution has to be a political and not a governmental one. Com-promise, in the sense of a deal for the appointment of some but not all of the Magnificent Seven, would be governmental. It would leave the political problem unsolved, and would falsely reassure the population that the crisis is over. Besides, it will not happen.
The last time I appeared on the TV6 Morning Edition, I put forward a suggestion which my fellow guest Lloyd Best promptly criticised in precisely those terms: that it was governmental rather than political. My response was that there is not so clear-cut a distinction between political and governmental as there is between political and legal. Government is one of the facets of politics, and more important, is a window through which people see and interpret politics.
In the present situation, all options seem to be blocked, including the option of new elections, because of mistrust of the voting lists. What was needed, I suggested, was a breathing space. I proposed that we try a scheme that had been tried in Guyana and in the Dominican Republic, with little success in the former but considerable success in the latter.
The proposal was this. Panday should be given his appointments. The PNM should withdraw the petitions against Gypsy and Chaitan. All parties should agree that there would be elections halfway through the term, say August 2003, on a date to be fixed in advance. The Elections and Boundaries Commission, augmented by representatives of all political parties, should use the time to put the voting lists in order. If, in anticipation of the election, popular concern should throw up a Constituent Assembly, well and good; adjustments to the scheme could be made, even including postponement of the elections to await a new constitutional framework. This is not so much a governmental proposal, I suggested, as a proposal for a transition from government to politics.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon