A case of high negligence
HOW could the party not know the rules of electoral engagement? How could the Prime Minister not know? How could the candidates, themselves, not know? How is the matter now going to be resolved without rupturing the body politic?Look, I have no doubt that neither Mr Chaitan nor Mr Peters was out to deceive when they signed that nomination form. How could they have been? They couldn’t believe that people here were so stupid or the PNM so asleep that they wouldn’t be found out. So it wasn’t nastiness at work here but negligence, and one has to wonder about a party that nominates two men known to have lived abroad for some time and not once asked either of them before confirming them as candidates:
“Here, nuh, is only one passport all yuh have right?” or some such question designed to find out whether they were not “under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state”.
I don’t know how the UNC plans to get out of this one, although I won’t be surprised if lawyers are hired to put their own spin on exactly what is to be construed from the words “under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience or adherence to any foreign power or state”.
Come to think of it, what could Mr Peters and Mr Chaitan have taken this clause to mean? Did they not read the form at all and simply signed it, believing everything to be honky dory as so many people do and then find out to their cost?
Or did they, having read it, say to themselves what was in their hearts which was:
“Who me? I have no allegiance to the United States (or Canada, as the case may be), they cyar tell me to do nutten,” the citizenship papers in their hands being nothing more or less than a convenience to have as much access to things American (or Canadian, as the case may be), even as they considered themselves to be Trinidadian in every fibre of their being.
They would not be singular in this regard, millions of immigrants the world over having become citizens of various countries, more as a matter of getting ahead and improving their quality of life than of binding themselves to those countries, that being a more prolonged process achieved, more likely than not, by their children and the generations evolved from their loins over time.
I don’t even know that Mr Chaitan and Mr Peters paid much mind to whatever oaths they made when they became citizens of the respective countries. Or, maybe, even as they mindlessly recited the words, they were merely going through the form, never imagining that years later they would come back to bite them.
The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that they never read the form, if only because had I been in their position, on reaching the instant clause I believe it would have given me pause and caused me to wonder:
“Wait, nuh...ah wonder if....”
Not, of course, as I began by saying, that the thing should even have reached there, the party and the participants clearly not having done the work they should have, which should tell us something about the organisational coherence of the party, it having fallen down on what surely, in the circumstances, was one of the most elementary of steps.
Having said all this, however, let me say that I find the constitutional requirement to be anachronistic given that dual citizenship is a reality here and that our citizens inhabit several worlds—which is not to say that I do not know that there are people who feel strongly about divided loyalties and who would not want to be represented in Parliament by someone who has one foot here and one foot there, that there usually being the United States which is, currently, trying to work itself out of its own conundrum, leading me to think, not for the first time, how this country sometimes turns out to be a kind of bizarre image of that one.
To tell the truth, though, I can’t see how the case is not going to go to court and I also can’t see how the PNM is not going to end up winning, but what I can clearly see is that such a deliverance is not going to do the country any good an overall PNM victory, in these circumstances, somehow not being whole whatever the rightness, in legal terms, of their case.
In which case the UNC’s supporters would be hard put to swallow their bitterness over the next five years and, partisanship being what it is, their bitterness may very well be directed towards the PNM and not towards the incompetence of their leadership at whatever the level responsible.
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