Resigning ourselves to mediocrity

It’s undoubtedly bad Christian manners to use a swearword on a Sunday, but shouldn’t Eddie Hart, Junior Minister in the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, have — pardon my French — resigned, his ministry after being found guilty of assaulting former Chaguanas Mayor Orlando Nagessar? I recognise that merely whispering the word “resign” is blasphemy in TT political culture. We could count on one hand the number of ministers who have resigned on principle. However, where and when are we going to draw the line? Was it not equally inappropriate for a minister to continue in office after being judged guilty of assault “by beating,” even if that minister has been discharged on a magisterial whim?

We all know that Hart received only a slight tap on the wrist because of whom he was, when in my opinion, the book should have been thrown at him, precisely because Hart, a more than one-time member of our Parliament, should have known better. It mattered not how much Hart might be loved by his people; here was a man who had repeatedly sworn to uphold the constitution and law of TT, long before the Nagessar incident, using aggression to resolve his political differences with an opponent. The sort of “discretion” the magistrate would have reserved for people in positions less ordinary than Hart’s, others who had sworn on no Holy Book, would have been quite different and we all know it. However, the magistrate’s decision was hers to make and hers to live with  for, as she pointed out, she enjoyed discretionary powers.

How do the rest of us exercise our own “discretion”? Do we let Hart off the political hook because he only collared Nagessar, because he didn’t draw the former mayor’s blood? What if Nagessar had opted to defend himself and a brawl had ensued? Hart’s aggressive conduct on that 2002 day was too perfect an example of the sort of society TT had become. In this country, disagreements are now settled by the fist, cutlass or gun. We could little afford for violence to be now a mode by which political disputes are decided, not if we are seriously worried about stemming crime and stopping the rot that is setting in. Yet we were behaving as if it were perfectly okay for Hart to remain where and what he was, a Junior Minister and an MP, who had assaulted a political opponent and got away with it because of “his position in life.”

We were not blinking, not even one eye, at Hart’s declaration that he would not resign or at his Prime Minister’s silence on the issue. We were as apathetic about a minister and a minister of culture no less, assaulting one of his rivals, as we had been to the sight of our Commissioner of Police knocking glasses at the scene of a brutal unsolved crime against a little boy. But just let a group of women mention the word “abortion” and the people of TT go ballistic, thousands of condemnatory letters are dispatched to the press. Or just let a newspaper do its job, and report the news by printing a picture of two men kissing on its front page; now that was in poor taste! Yet we could easily stomach a minister found guilty of assault.

What next were we going to find politically palatable? Not because a magistrate decided that it was acceptable to assault someone once it was election time or once you held a certain position in society, did the rest of us have to adjudge Hart’s conduct correct. We were under no obligation to be guided by the magistrate’s “discretion,” to deem Hart free to continue to occupy office, even if he had walked away from the court scot-free.
We could not be. Not if we intend to start building a better society. Not if we want our youth to respect us. Certainly not if we ascribe to the principles of integrity and accountability in public life. The buck called responsible TT leadership has to stop somewhere, sometime and not in never-never land on the twelfth of never.

Hart might have thought he was grasping the “buck” by describing the assault as “an unfortunate incident, which happened in the heat of the excitement for the elections and which he hoped would never happen again,” but he was wrong. Words were simply not good enough; politicians make lots of promises they never keep. Hart had not even had the grace to apologise to Nagessar. And if the Prime Minister believed that by quoting the Ten Commandments, we were left reassured that the PNM was grasping the buck, then he too, was misguided.

Sermons, like euphemisms, were not equivalent to accountability. Someone who was accountable was completely responsible for what they did and able to give a satisfactory reason for it. Everyone was capable of losing their temper, but since this loss of control happened when Hart was in public life, ought it not to carry a similarly public price? Had Hart, as a Minister and MP accounted for his actions sufficiently? By his mere appearance in court, had Hart settled his public debt? Was his reason for collaring Nagessar satisfactory? These are some of the questions to be answered.

A few days after Hart walked out of the Tunapuna Magistrates’ Court swinging his arms and swearing to continue “working assiduously to achieve things in his constituency,” his party announced it had set up a committee to deal with crime. Ironically, members of the PNM’s General Council said they felt that not enough was being done to tackle TT’s crime epidemic; in other words, it was time to deal with the PNM’s “criminal” shortcomings.

No announcement was made however, on whether Hart’s resignation had been even mentioned. I am not thus, very optimistic about the committee’s future deliberations or findings: General Council members appear unable to locate the “me” in “crime” and seem ignorant of the fact that “integrity” starts with “I.”