AFFIRMATIVE ACTION OR 2007 VISION?

Call it female intuition, political mistrust if you will, but whenever our politicos start using cloudy notions like “geographical arithmetic” to justify their demand for more seats, I reach for my EBC reports, my copy of the Republican Constitution and a calculator. Which is exactly what I did when I heard THA Chief Secretary Orville London’s hazy hypothesis that Tobago, in order to remain politically relevant, should have its seats increased to a minimum of three because the EBC had recommended Trinidad contain 39, not 34 constituencies. After several hours of reading and mathematical gymnastics, I came to the conclusion that London’s affirmative action plan for Tobago had nil to do with cementing the island’s place in national politics and every bit to do with boosting the PNM’s 2007 political fortunes.

The truth is that the first thing that led me to suspect that there was a PNM, not Tobagonian mortar in London’s pestle was the THA head’s insistence on underscoring that the seats in Tobago now contained an electorate of over 18,000, but his failure to mention what the size of the Trinidad constituencies currently was. London also declined to note that the EBC decision to recommend 39 seats for Trinidad but no change in the number of electoral districts for Tobago had been based on clear cut rules for determining the size of constituencies. These rules are set out in the Second Schedule of the very Constitution it seemed the PNM has been scouring for a loophole to use to challenge the EBC report, ever since it calculated that if electors in Trinidad voted according to tribe in 2007, its majority over the UNC might be slimmer than it is now.

You see, the PNM currently enjoys a four constituency majority over the UNC; two of these seats are in Trinidad, two in Tobago. With the boundary changes, the year 2007 (judging by past voting patterns) could see the PNM winning 22 seats and the UNC 19, a difference of three seats. If you threw in a new UNC leader, a third party to do some vote splitting in Trinidad and the growing disenchantment with the PNM, the Balisier’s margin in Trinidad could be whittled down some more. Naturally, London wants more seats in Tobago, all in Tobago west no doubt, a PNM stronghold. And naturally, the Prime Minister finds London’s PNM seat proposal packaged as a campaign for Tobago “interesting and not to be ignored.”  It is a backdoor way of challenging the EBC’s report and getting more safe PNM seats.

But you know what really led me to conclude that London was thinking more of his party than of Tobagonians was when I used London’s own geographical arithmetic premise to calculate the difference in “impact,” two seats had on a legislature of 36, compared with the force two MPs would possess in a congress of 41. The difference was negligible. Having two of 36 seats gave Tobago 5.5 percent of the total power, whereas if it had two of 41, it would possess 4.8 percent of the power. What a step-down! I also measured what Tobago’s strength would be if it had three constituencies of 42. It was seven percent. No wonder THA Minority Leader Hochoy Charles described London’s plan as “frivolous, vexatious and backward.” Charles was right. London’s is a silly numbers game, designed not to give more clout to Tobago but more seats to the PNM.

Charles was right on another score, it didn’t matter how many Tobago MPs you put in the Parliament; they’d be voiceless and subservient to Central Government and thus, to Trinidad. Eudine Job-Davis and Stanford Callender are not serving Tobago; they are serving in Patrick Manning’s Cabinet. An increase in Tobago seats will only make sense if the number of seats in Trinidad is multiplied by two because then MPs and Parliament can extract themselves from under the thumb of the executive and better represent the people. Have London and the PNM forgotten the complaints in 2003 from Job-Davis about the Tobago representative becoming irrelevant because he or she had no say in how Tobago was being developed? Will one or two additional Tobago MPs be any more significant? Has London also forgotten that when Job-Davis called for the relationship between the THA and the Tobago MP to be revisisted and redefined, London called her ideas “dangerous,” saying they threatened the autonomy of the THA and that Manning gave her a Ministry to shut her up? What a strange advocate for more Tobago MPs London now makes and how mysteriously conciliatory the PM now appears since this “Tobago” challenge to the EBC report. To date, the Government can’t provide the people of Tobago with a reliable ferry service, but it is worried about giving it an extra seat in the House of Representatives. Yes, this will surely solve Tobago’s development problems.

You know what this London seat proposal is going to achieve? It will contribute to ensuring that race remains centre stage in Trinidad and Tobago’s politics, obscuring all other issues, as members of the UNC are hardly na?ve enough to believe that the Chief Secretary is not trying to help his party. Add to that, the silly intransigence over the Trinity Cross, the constant counting of “Indians” and “Africans” and we have a nation whose parties can always count on the support by voters moved by tribe. After the election, though, no matter who wins, is every creed and race to catch.

What the PNM is seeking to do by every means necessary, is bury its Afro-Saxon head in the sand and avoid the new plural reality of Trinidad and Tobago. It is a reality that is everyday insisting more and more that all our leaders stop trying to tinker with the Constitution, to gerrymander, to voter-pad or to use race to stay in power and instead, start embracing meaningful constitutional reform, which will take into account the reality that Trinidad and Tobago’s peoples are not suffering from “race”; they are suffering from “government,” which means that everyone — “Indian” and “African,” Trinidadian and Tobagonian — is just plain suffering.

suz@itrini.com