Trinidad Express
Tobago News
Trinidad Guardian
Yetminster Parliament
January 28, 2001
By Denis Solomon
ONE of the worst things that could have happened to traditional politics in this country was the televising of Parliamentary debates.
Every time I see a broadcast from the House of Representatives or the Senate I bitterly regret the lack of TV coverage during the period in 1975 when I was one of four Tapia opposition Senators. We had gone into the Senate not to represent the ideas of the Opposition DLP (it hadn't any) but to show what Parliamentary debate could be like, and if possible to mash up the whole system by using the Senate as a political platform for Tapia ideas of national reconstruction.
I flatter myself that the main reason we failed was that in order to appreciate what we were doing the public had either to attend the sessions or read the newspaper reports of them. This cut our potential audience to almost nothing.
I was confirmed in this view by the brainless sitcom that has constituted the entire bill of fare of the televised meetings of Parliament since the opening of the new term. Even with the debates on tap in their living-rooms for the last ten years, the public, for lack of a standard of comparison, may have failed to realise that Parliamentary debate, particularly in the lower House, has been nothing more than electioneering and reciprocal vituperation. But the spectacle afforded to TV viewers since the new session opened is so surrealistic that the scales are now certain to fall from their eyes.
The Constitutional and electoral crises have already stimulated public awareness of the deficiencies of the country's political class. This awareness is certainly being heightened by the Parliamentary three-ring circus now available for viewing at the touch of a button. One wonders what the presumably sober and moderately intelligent Gerald Yetming, accustomed to operating in the decision-oriented atmosphere of bank management, thought he had got himself into as he listened to Ministers and prominent Opposition members, including the Opposition Leader, wrangling over the appropriateness of his apparel when they should have been debating the Finance Bill. Probably he knew already what Parliament would be like, and has already fallen into the fatal error shared by all his ministerial colleagues and predecessors: that Parliament is merely something to be endured, and whenever possible avoided, as part of the price of a job in Government. One remembers the Minister of Agriculture in the previous administration, Reeza Mohammed, congratulating himself on being able to avoid answering Parliamentary questions by temporarily fleeing the country.
The Yetming shirt debate was the edifying spectacle offered to television audiences by the first regular session of the House of Representatives following the ceremonial opening. Of the opening itself, the less said the better: in my Independent column two Fridays ago I described the idiotic order of proceedings that the Constitutional anomalies imposed—for example, the Speaker being elected before there was an assembly to elect him, and a duly elected representative of the people being welcomed to Parliament by the man whose a-- she had just buss at the polls.
If that wasn't enough, the Prime Minister put the cap on it with his amazing statement to the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Listening to that flood of recycled claptrap interlarded with half-truths, innuendoes and factual inaccuracies, my first reaction was to wonder how his party colleagues could sit there passively while he made fools of himself and them. In any serious legislative assembly, instead of being applauded by dutiful desk-thumping, he would have been shouted down before he got halfway through, and by his own side.
There is no need to go into the details of Panday's nonsense. My whole point is that television has enabled people to judge it for themselves. In any case my colleague BC Pires has dealt with its salient idiocies in his column in the Friday Express. But television did something else that newspaper reports couldn't, which was to show the heads of the security services in their resplendent uniforms lending bewildered visual support to the Prime Minister's insanity, and the unmistakable disgust of their body language as they filed out of the chamber in his wake.
Then, as if to show that television was not the only medium bent on reinforcing the public's awareness of our mickey-mouse politics, the Express brought off a coup by publishing, the very next morning, a front-page story by Ucill Cambridge headlined "What Plot?" Cambridge interviewed the Chief of Defence Staff, Brigadier John Sandy, immediately after the Prime Minister's speech. Brigadier Sandy declared that, far from discussing the supposed plot with the protective services, the Prime Minister had merely told them to send someone to the Red House to hear an interesting announcement. The television, in turn, made it clear that, having summoned the defence chiefs, the Prime Minister made sure they were seated on the floor of the Chamber, in full view of the cameras, rather than in the public gallery.
While I'm on the subject of the televising of the speech, let me tell Raffique Shah that in my opinion he does have grounds for a defamation suit against Mr Panday. Raffique challenged the Prime Minister to make his statement outside Parliament. Well, in my opinion he has done so. The speech was indeed made in Parliament, but it was also used by the Prime Minister as a televised address to the nation, with an introduction in which he said something to the effect that he was now bringing it to the people. To me that puts him outside the protection of Parliamentary privilege. Go to it, Raffique! There could be $600,000 in damages waiting for you.
Another contribution the media are making to public awareness is to show how often Panday has to resort to Ramesh's help to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. It is said that it was Ramesh who repaired the damage done by the inefficient screening of Gypsy and Chaitan, by dreaming up the idea of Constitutional motions (of which as Attorney General he would be the defendant). Now Ramesh has had to "explain" to the public that Panday was not in breach of the standing orders of the House when he lambasted the President. But an already unconvincing explanation was rendered completely ludicrous by the coskel setting in which it was delivered. Ramesh has devised for his TV appearances a setting of comic-opera self-aggrandisement. Its main feature is an immense banner inscribed "Ministry of the Attorney General", surmounting a lectern. Behind this Ramesh stands, while at the level of his genitals there hangs, like a glossy fig-leaf, a pennant carrying the national coat of arms and the legend "In God We Trust".
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon