Keith Smith
January 27, 2000
ATTORNEY GENERAL RAMESH MAHARAJ:
"T here is a clear constitutional duty for a President of the Republic to comply with the advice of a Prime Minister calling for the removal and appointment of senators. Every President has promptly complied whenever so advised by a Prime Minister."
BUT with the greatest respect, Mr Maharaj, the Constitution-makers never envisaged a government consisting of two different parties ( how could they in those early days?). The Government now comprises a majority UNC, shall we say, and a minority NAR, Tobago NAR at that.
In every government in the world of this kind that I know the comprising parties represent the interests of their own party.
In our context this means that the Tobago senators represent the interest of the Tobago people through the party in Tobago which is the NAR. The two Tobago senators that the UNC partner now wishes to remove because they voted against a particular clause in a government bill were never, to put it simply, Mr Panday's men ( I am using the generic term here) but Mr Charles's and were obliged to vote not as Mr Panday would have them but as Mr Charles.
And that is what they did when they voted against a particular clause in the Tourism Development Bill that, in Mr Charles's, theirs and the Tobago House of Assembly's view would have removed from the THA the right to prevent any tourism development in Tobago that they judged not to be in Tobago's interests.
So while the Government is insisting on past constitutional tradition it cannot apply because it conflicts with the political reality, a circumstance that suggests that we have not to fire the "offending" senators but to fix the Constitution.
This is not the first such suggestion in the history of Trinidad and Tobago but is, easily, the most dramatic because the inconsistency pits President against Prime Minister, giving flesh and bones to the inconsistency as it were. It might be useful here for the population to understand that whatever a constitution says is not cast in stone but has to be worked out over the life of the nation and, as you know sir, we are just over 30 years old which means we have a lot of constitutional things still to work out.
All of which is to say, sir, that I believe that Senator Martin Daly is right in that while you gave a statement of law, the problem is political and requires political solutions that may eventually have to be given constitutional effect.
PRESIDENT ARTHUR NR ROBINSON:
....It is a fact that the two senators from Tobago are there and they are there in order to represent the interest of Tobago. If they see any considerable destruction to Tobago arising from matters for which decisions are being taken, it is their duty to refrain or oppose such decisions...
Such as, I suppose, you mean , sir, the clause that they opposed which would have taken away from the THA the responsibility to give final approval to all development projects, particularly those relating to tourism and as for "considerable destruction to Tobago," I didn't know what you were referring to in that BBC interview until I heard Hochoy Charles in that Sunil Ramdeen interview insisting that it was his experience that the THA had to intervene time and time again to stop or, at least, delay hotel projects that had been conceived or approved in Port of Spain but which would have had a destructive impact on the Tobago environment, not least Buccoo Reef.
And there was Mr Charles citing a proposed Four Seasons Hotel for the Golden Grove/ No Man's Land area, another near King's Bay, and a project that would have envisaged the closing of the Grafton Road so that they could build hotels there. Something, he said, that was "very sensitive to the people of Tobago."
So what, to me, Mr Charles seemed to be saying was that quite apart from the principle of the thing, Tobago's autonomy and all that, it was the Tobagonian experience that the central government only saw dollars when Tobagonians had to consider things such as the impact on the environment since it was they and not Mr Humphrey, nor Mr Maharaj, for that matter, who would have to live there..
PRESIDENT ARTHUR NR ROBINSON:
... I have the background of the relationship of the two islands and I know the dangers of adopting courses which appear to be suppressing the interest of one island at the expense of the other. There has to be protective arrangements for the other island...I would say it is a national ( rather, I suppose, than a political interest). In the interest of preserving the State...the preservation of the State is a presidential interest.....
Let me be very frank here, sir, and say that in this very column I vehemently opposed your ascension, if I can call it that, to the presidency believing, as I still do, that you were perceived to be too recently partisan a politician to be given a position that, naively, perhaps meant that you had always to be above the fray.
I thought, then, that your seeking the presidency or, at least, your acceptance of it stemmed not from greed so much as it did from a kind of overweening ambition, an almost paranoid desire, stemming from deep-seated insecurities to buttress your sense of self by seeking status heaped upon status.
I am still reluctant to believe that you knew that somewhere down the road you'd have to intervene as president to stop the majority partner in what was initially touted as a UNC/NAR coalition government. But, against that, ringing in my ears, is Mr Charles's assertion in that very television interview that precisely because the Constitution did not provide for a coalition government some creative measure of procedure, certain rules and regulations had to be worked outside and around that Constitution.
Since you were instrumental along with Mr Panday in the formation of the UNC/NAR government it is reasonable for me to believe that you were not only party to but had a decisive hand in the formation of those extra-constitutional rules and regulations among which, I am beginning to think, must have been the guarantee that Tobago would have its own independent voice and that nothing would be done to give it less rather than more power over the conduct of its own affairs. The minute that undertaking appeared to be being sabotaged by the majority partner was the minute that brought us closer to a great risk of splintering this two-island state.
Well, sir, if I am correct in the conclusions I have drawn so far, then it seems to me understandable that you should think you had a duty to step in and advise and warn. "Well, wait a minute here" because if a president isn't duty-bound to do all he can to preserve the integrity of his country, particularly given from where and how he came to that presidency, then what the hell, I ask you Mr Maharaj, again with the greatest respect, is he there for?
What beats me, though, is why when it moved to give Tobago less power through a clause that its senators, undoubtedly acting on advice from Mr Charles and his party, found offensive, the Government did not see the trouble it was courting. And even before that, how come the UNC government majority, when it began giving short shrift to its NAR minority, jettisoning at least the spirit of the partnership, how come Mr Panday, sir, it did not see that down the road there would be real political costs to pay?
Did you, like me, Mr Panday, sir, make the mistake of believing that Mr Robinson would be too enamoured with the perks of presidential prestige to give a Tobago damn?
And, Mr Robinson, did you see yuh boy Hochoy on TV? He good, eh!