If I Were the President…
I wouldn't know what to do. By which I don't mean that I don't have knowledge, or that I wouldn't act. What I mean is that, barring biased personal discretions, I don't have the benefit of a manual that predicts the stalemate in which Trinidad and Tobago has now slowed to a parliamentary standstill and instructs how it should be broken.
All the manual that we have tells us is that the President must in his own deliberate discretion elect as prime minister the elected member of parliament that enjoys the support of the majority of elected members. In so saying, it presumes that there will be in any general election a member who has majority support.
In a stalemate of 18-18 in which Panday enjoys, by written or campaign statement, the support of his 17 other UNC winners and Manning that of his 17 other PNM winners, I can't see how as President I can know that majority support exists for either man or for any other member. And yet I must exercise my discretion in the context of that stalemate!
The manual doesn't say the discretion must be exercised on the basis of the overall number of votes a party has won, or on the basis of the ruling party ending up with fewer seats than it entered the election with, or on the basis of the opposition party winning more seats than it had before. It doesn't say either that the discretion must be based on the fact that one party was in power for the six preceding years and the other in the wilderness for at least those years. And it doesn't say that it must be based on a perceived loss of credibility on the part of the ruling party for massive corruption.
If not on these things, on what then? The manual is useless where these things are concerned and, doubtless, that is the reason why the lawyers and political scientists, who normally see themselves as the experts in interpretation, have been deafeningly silent and, like the ordinary mortal, have been waiting for the President to act, that is, to give his verdict. It is as if the Presidency, by virtue of either the office itself or special qualities of the occupant, has wisdom far superior to what any of the rest of us has and, as a result, can create sense out of nonsense.
The history of human experience tells us that though there are specially gifted individuals among us, the gifts do not include wisdom. Individuals may be specially gifted in music, language, mathematics, painting, calypso, physical healing, and the like, but not, so far as our vast knowledge store goes, in wisdom. The latter comes with age and experience, and, if we believe some testimonies, with divine revelation. Mr Robinson is a capable man, brilliant even, in several respects (remember his brilliance in the creeping dictatorship speech?), but he has not merely muddled many times over in matters of governance and politics; he has made, if you can free your mind of subservient loyalty, stark errors, the most insistent one for me being his failure to broker a deal for Tobago with Panday when in a predecessor stalemate in Trinidad of 17-17 he used his two seats in Tobago to give the government to a fella called Basdeo Panday.
For abundant clarity, the error lay, not in giving Panday the government (he was absolutely right on that!), but in not - by some obtuse, obscure principle - using the opportunity to run some real politics and make a deal for Tobago.
It was the strange absence of politics in a man who had spent over 35 years in active national politics and who liked to boast about it.
Given the uselessness of the manual, what can he rely on now but politics? He has grown since 1995, that year of squandered political opportunity, and it has shown most recently in his calling in Panday and Manning for political, not constitutional, discussions. He asked them to work out arrangements for breaking the stalemate, recognising that that stalemate had disabled his discretion. In other words, he asked them to make political deals. If I were he, that's what I would have done.
But look at what those two gentlemen have done! They have arrived at some important political compromises, but where compromise was most needed - in the determination of who should be prime minister - they failed politically by leaving it to the very President who was looking for a political way out. And a crucial reason for this failure is that they relied on the twin futilities of maximum leadership and party consultation, instead of nationwide consultation with all the stakeholder communities, to broker the deals. One of them, Panday, talked of not being prepared to surrender power or be bossed!
So it is still up to the President. And if I were he, I would, acting in my ignorance, just appoint one of them and not expose that ignorance by explaining the rationale. Since as a politician I had already given Panday the government….
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