January 29, 2000
By Lloyd Best
T his crisis has many dimensions parliamentary, governmental, constitutional, political. Above all, cultural. In the end, what it puts at issue is our authoritarian, constitutionalist, over-reverent way of proceeding. The tradition of the slave and colonial society has been to kowtow, hopefully to subvert.
We've not had the courage to entertain the terrors of freedom, democracy and their related responsibilities.
All over the West Indies we're still in the jail of Doctor Politics, Maximum Leadership and One-man rule. The political community is anchored in ethnicity. We have to be content with campaign and election outfits. We never ever rise to effective party organisation. We rely on primal, mindless and automatic solidarity vehicled by race, class, colour, religion or island-homeland.
In the WI we are therefore wholly without the habit of politics, the ingredient without which democratic participation simply cannot function. We depend on the arbitrary and the violent. We carry on with an educated elite which has no concept whatsoever of the way our own system of government and politics operates. We wallow in categories and slogans which come out of the 19th century European experience conveyed through provincial universities which excuse their own ignorance with capsule notions. The Third World or the developing countries are deemed to be in a mess because they do not practise an effective separation of powers; or they import the (Westminster) model but do not succeed in making it work.
What we're in effect mismanaging is a distinctive WI system of its own kind. Even more than Westminster, it is based on the centralisation and not the separation of powers. Judicial independence and agency or Estate specialisation have to be achieved by means cultural and political, not constitutional.
An almost complete integration is promoted in part by the Constitution as text. Unlike its Westminster counterpart, this system guarantees the Government a majority in the Upper House and gives it the right to appoint and replace the Senators.
Most other features of the system are culturally and politically rather than constitutionally based. Because it seeks to make the informal role of politics decisive, Westminster is careful to avoid any constitutional text. The legalities it reduces to the barest minimum. It does not want to take the chance that a written and therefore pre-conceived provision might bridle any player. Not when, imperative for its operation, is a complete participation by all the players, all intervening on their own account, as their own agents, if necessary. Precisely what West India has at every stage blocked.
Right from the start, historian Spurdle writes, the WI system centred all legislative, executive, taxative, judicial and military authority in the Proprietor. Practical arrangements gave the Governor on the spot the fullest discretion, an awesome concentration of power and responsibility. Whatever modifications the planters made to this system through the Houses of Assembly, they never let the multitude of the people in, not even in principle. To the slave society, the culture of exclusion was absolutely indispensable.
After Emancipation, the Colonial Office reverted to the almost total centralisation of the mid 17th century. It soon generalised the Crown Colony model invented for Trinidad, where even the planters had been pointedly left out on grounds of being French, Creole, and often, coloured as well.
At Independence, Williams mouthed party politics and constitution reform. A retrospective will find it hard not to conclude that he was interested in the necessary political education only in so far as that was consistent with hegemony of party and Leader. In 1960 James duly warned him to stop the God-damned domination of everybody else but that only led to a parting.
Whereas the Governor had been legitimated from outside and above, Williams invoked Adult Suffrage and the disciplined nation-wide party to validate Doctor Politics from inside and below.
Not too much changed from the colonial days. The Political Leader was now King having displaced the viceroy. As Chairman of the Cabinet, he presided over the Executive and Government.
Informally, working through culture and politics rather than law and Constitution, the Chief Executive took over the governor's role as head of the Public Service. He seldom had to give orders but nobody he disapproved of could hope to be appointed. Since he effectively controlled his party's choice of election candidates and could have a crapaud voted into the Legislature, in the context of political communities and parties ethnically based, the Leader was also in the end boss of the Legislature as well. The majority in both houses was safely in his patronage, if initially and even later, with important exceptions. It all worked through congruence of perspective, culture, consensus.
Some therefore say this crisis of an overbearing Chief Executive is old and enduring. Or no crisis at all or no crisis as yet. They have to be careful they do not confirm the obsolescence of the educated elites, their almost complete alienation from politics in general and their specific inability to feel the pulse of the time. The fact of the matter is that this is perhaps the most revolutionary crisis ever to have descended on the whole WI. Not the predictable type of crisis that visited often during slavery and colonialism but the altogether paradoxical crisis of democracy and freedom. An autonomous crisis propelled by improvements not dispossessions down below, driven by political urges without any violence, for the very first time.
It is only by accident that Robinson is at its centre at a time when the planets are lined up in a revolutionary conjuncture. Because of risks inherent in his relations with Panday, he was always a problematic choice for President. But, as Fate would have it, in addition to being half of the Executive, heading the ceremonial branch and enjoying substantive powers of assent, appointment and consultation, he was also at one point half the two party parliamentary coalition which in 1995 endowed the Government with its working majority. As former Chairman of the NAR and architect of home rule for Tobago, the President, is still the leader, in spite of himself, informally and politically. He therefore speaks for a half the two-island republic. With the Chief Executive running rampant, how could this not be an explosive situation?