Defeat for our political system

THE EDITOR: A great deal has been revealed by the results of the 2003 Local Government Elections. Those revelations can easily be seen as the final, much needed indictment on our political system and exposes the inescapable need for fundamental changes in the way the people and the Government of Trinidad and Tobago do business. Few would disagree that the nation finds itself in a predicament today that was very carefully structured with the help of the population’s own unwillingness to think for itself and preference for allowing leaders to do the thinking. It makes one wonder how the current period will be described later on when others reflect upon the mistakes we made. The time has come for each citizen of Trinidad and Tobago to find or make the time to pause, reflect, understand and reconsider. What has happened? Where are we now? What brought us here and on this path, where are we headed? Our very survival as a nation depends on us willingly accepting that vital “growing pain” of pausing to reflect and reconsider. In doing that we must also steel ourselves with a firm resolve to embrace change where needed. And we have sufficient years of colonial and independent history upon which to reflect.

One of the major revelations of the recent elections is the fact that it was simply not a victory for anyone but rather one of the most resounding defeats for our entire political system. The system itself has experienced a failure and a near breakdown, owing largely to the evident loss of trust among the people of the country coupled with a number of a ‘newly street wise voters’ who have decided that political support of philosophy and ideas is insignificant when one considers the gains of PIP (party in power) support. What we can expect of this and quite likely it has already started to occur, is that more and more of the population will lose sight of needs, replacing them with quick fix desires. Our system is being pulled deeper into a mode of ‘today for today’ and tomorrow will deal with itself. We can expect things to become more reckless later on. Coming out of the last election also was a very clear indication that people have wised up to the fact that unless the party they support controls the Government, they can hardly hope for a fair shake in various development projects. The cost of street-lights and clear drains was a vote for PIP. If you could not pay by that method of exchange then you would literally be left in the dark. Take a hole in the road as further penance. And as the results showed, many decided to withhold the little political currency they controlled perhaps in hope of shaking up the political directorate. But that strategy failed. The People’s National Movement leader was beside himself as he proclaimed unprecedented victory for his party. And the leader of the Opposition pledged to fight harder.

But neither of the leaders cared to admit that the results of not even a 40 percent vote pointed to a very serious decline in the level of support for both parties and politics in general. It points to a heightening in the level of cynicism. The failure to do this reflects poorly on both men as leaders and the results provide evidence of the need for constitution reform. People have convinced themselves almost fully that voting is irrelevant unless they are willing to step aside from their principled support and jump onto the bandwagon of PIP. The Local results also created a fierce atmosphere that bared the preoccupation with the PNM on destroying the Opposition and not merely tactically fighting it, which clearly is not an option. Tact creates the possibility of making people think, destruction simply would create the feeling of, ‘well there is no one else.’ The party in Government refuses to accept that the Opposition represents opposing ideas of a great many people, and rather than busying themselves with studying their views and truly working for the good of the people, they want to stomp on the other side. So, in a situation where half of the population is extremely sensitive, Patrick Manning is telling the support base of the Opposition to come across and be a part of the PNM or you too will be destroyed.

Things were made worse after the callous revival of the view of a “hostile and recalcitrant minority” by Government MP, Fitzgerald Hinds. UNC supporters must either remain just that, or by virtue of joining the PNM, embrace a ‘new’ and ‘progressive’ ideal. And our political system allows men and women to proclaim these things with impunity. But for all of the faults of our political system, the people of this country must shoulder the mass of the blame for allowing us to sink so low before realising that the need for change must not be manipulated by the whims of the Prime Minister, but must rather be influenced by two sobering factors, the good of the state and the good of the people. By 2005, we will arrive at the Government’s mid term and the PNM will have under its belt, the mistaken claim of the Local Election victory. And they will use it as the whip that they will attempt to continue to blister the UNC with. But this blistering could well be, as it is now, in the absence of any genuine claims to policies and programmes that can induce development of the nation. The development of human capital must be the primary goal of any Government driven by a genuine desire for full development. And we have seen nothing of the sort in spite of claims that development is continuing apace. But having never considered what our goals must be in an international context, most of the population is not even aware of the place the nation is at right now. The minority voice of reason that has been mostly ignored in the past must become the pervading influence in this period of reflection. Under that influence, we need to consider all the factors that brought us to this point. The people must consider how many times they resisted political education. And there were many times. They resisted it because of a culture of ‘liking things simple.’

The people must consider how cheaply they surrendered their chances for comfort by blind political support in exchange for dead end relief jobs. The people must consider how they allowed leaders the privilege of re-inventing the roles that votes gave them by adopting the position of ‘do as I say’ and who don’t like it, ‘grin and bear it.’ People need to understand that the nation will not develop until they begin accepting challenges. And the first challenge is to force a new, intelligent, sensitive and progressive kind of leadership based on the dictates of a new constitution that would allow the equity most believe they can never have. As a country, we must crave a new understanding where we pull ourselves up to knowledge rather than wanting it all to be oversimplified for us. It spells a need for a complete overhaul of the way we live and the rules we live by. The election result has also shown our still too strong preoccupation with personalities. We argue so much along those lines primarily because we have placed the highest premium on personalities in politics.

But that has allowed the development of egoistic men and women who have grown to believe that it is their divine right to lead. And then we argue against the result of the efforts we endorsed. Much of our politics is therefore contradictory and that represents the flat tire that we refuse to change in the vehicle that must take us forward. Halfmadeness is actually one of Naipaul’s more generous descriptions of our society. We have not come to the point of being able to think for ourselves. We depend on polls to tell us who will win. We depend on analysts and the media to form our opinions, we depend on foreign agencies to tell us how our private and public sectors are functioning, we condemn propaganda and yet fall prey to it and while we condemn leaders, we cannot articulate our own views because we just don’t know what to say or do. A pause for reflection MUST occur, under conditions that allow people to understand that they are the ones who will cause development or prevent it and how. More than that, they are the ones who can pull the country out of this rut. It is not about waiting for the Government to make the right decisions. The people must accept the education that would allow them to know what the right decisions are. And I dare say that would be the worst fear of any Government: a population that is aware of what it needs, and how to achieve it. It will be a long process but it must start and be sustained in part by the politicians relaxing their foolish stunts for attention and allowing the population to consider the things that can make us a fully made society.

ROGER D RAMCHARITAR
Port-of-Spain