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Same Khaki Pants
December 09, 2001
By Denis Solomon
Fundamental issues of governance have played no part whatsoever in the 2001 election campaign. Instead of providing an occasion to focus on basic questions of governance, the campaign has consisted mainly of irresponsible pie-in-the-sky promises and of robust and unrelenting reciprocal abuse.
The vision that both UNC and PNM have for the country is tunnel vision. So we press ahead in the new millennium trailing a host of unsolved problems of governance. They will all recur. Parliament will never again be able to elect a Speaker from within its own ranks. There will be favouritism and neglect in local government administration. Tobago will continue to be discontented at its role in dividing the national pie and its share of it. At some time or another an Attorney General and a Chief Justice will again be at loggerheads, with no superior forum for resolution of their disputes. Sooner or later a President of the Republic will have misgivings about signing a bill or making an appointment.
Let me confess right away that the two paragraphs above were taken from my column in the Independent on the eve of the 2000 general election. They are as relevant now as then.
Nobody expected the Constitution, as a set of institutions, to be part of the campaign. In any campaign, bread and butter issues, however chimerical, must prevail. But the underlying issues that bedevilled us in 2000 remain; and during the interregnum others of even greater immediacy have surfaced, some of them being partly the reason why we are having another election.
For example, whichever party gets the most seats, we will still not know whether a person who has a voluntarily acquired foreign citizenship can ever become a Member of Parliament. Since the 2000 Parliament is dissolved, the representation petition against Winston “Gypsy” Peters has lapsed. Presumably he has now renounced his US citizenship, so no petition will be brought against him this time. But possibility of a charge of making a false declaration in 2000 has not lapsed. Consequently, the voters of Ortoire/Mayaro still do not know whether they are voting for a candidate who may end up in jail. If that happens, where does that leave his opponent, Franklyn Khan? Can he claim compensation for his exclusion from Parliament between 2000 and 2001? And since the same thing may happen to Bill Chaitan, although he is not a candidate this time, where does that leave Farad Khan, Chaitan’s 2000 opponent?
The EBC has been the subject of pre-election wrangling this time round, but purely because of voter-padding and the doubt surrounding the completeness of the lists. The Gypsy-Chaitan affair, however, brings up the question, which has not received an answer during the campaign, as to whether, and how, the EBC should be endowed with power to verify the data supplied by candidates and annul their candidacy if the data are false, thereby precluding a recurrence of the Gypsy-Chaitan mess. That, by extension, raises the question of the composition of the EBC.
Another thing we will not know about our political system is the number of losing general election candidates that can be tolerated in the Senate and the government. Both the PNM and the TU claim to be campaigning against UNC dictatorship. But will they, if either of them wins, reduce the power that has made that dictatorship possible? The answer is obvious. The only example of constitutional support for doctor politics that has been mentioned has been the Crossing-the-Floor Act, which Mr Manning has promised not to abolish but to strengthen, “within seconds”.
Should Ramesh Maharaj find himself in a position to prevent a future Parliament from passing bills by the wrong majority, and thus prevent the waste of time and money that occurred in the Brad Boyce case, he will certainly not do so, since manipulating the Constitution has been his personal speciality.
If the PNM wins, Patrick Manning will certainly not modify the charter of the NBN to make it less of a tool in the hands of a PNM, or any future government. He may hasten to sign the Chapultepec Declaration. He may move to restore Trinidad and Tobago’s membership in the UN and Inter-American Human rights Conventions. These would be good propaganda without demonstrable reduction in executive power. But he will certainly try to avoid keeping the promise that I extracted from him at a press conference last year: to give Parliament the power to ratify accession to or withdrawal from treaties in the future.
All we can expect if the UNC loses the election is a reduction in stridency, not a fundamental change in governance. Like the new Russian national anthem, the words will be different, but the tune will be the same.
Who wins the election is of no importance, since what will be won is control of a flawed system. The next election that will make a real difference in Trinidad and Tobago will not be tomorrow’s. It will be the election that sends delegates to a constituent assembly to craft a polity more rational and fruitful than the ill-designed structure that now sustains our political life.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon
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