Next month the UNC holds its first executive elections since its infamous internal poll of June 2001, which marked the public beginning of the end of the UNC Government. At the centre of the storm was Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, the then Attorney General, who “dared” to contest the deputy leadership of the party, which his boss, former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday saw as a challenge to his rule. Panday’s — and his financiers’ choice — was then UNC MP for St Joseph, Carlos John, who was soundly beaten by Maharaj in a heated campaign. Panday dismissed the election results and the war was on.
The last segment of the path I am taking from Newsday’s office on Chacon Street to my interview venue on St Vincent Street proves to be a walk through political memory lane 2001.
I am on the pavement, in front of the ostentatious Ministry of the Attorney General, also called the Taj Maharaj because of its style and for the man who had it constructed, former United National Congress Attorney General, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj. A few steps more bring me to the door of the old Colonial Life building, which in 2001 was the architectural symbol for everything against which Maharaj and his group were fighting — the hijack of the party by financiers. On the other side of the street, the majestic Red House spans the space separating the Taj Maharaj and CLICO. I stop to gaze at it and I am again in the parliamentary Chamber on October 5, 2001, four days after UNC Prime Minister Basdeo Panday fired Maharaj. It is a Friday afternoon, which outside the House, seems no different from any other parliamentary day, but which inside, feels like an explosion is about to take place.
On this day, October 5, 2001, Maharaj and his teammates in ministerial exile, Trevor Sudama and Ralph Maraj will vote against their administration’s legislation. I can still hear the ex-AG’s voice boom throughout a hushed legislature, see him deliver from the backbench, his knockout punch, “The present Government is not the UNC Government. I cannot support this measure.” I step unwillingly out of this historical triangle to hustle to my destination, located only a few strides away. I am hoping this faded four-storey building in front of which I am standing, will open the door a little more to the events of two years ago. This year’s UNC executive elections in June have reminded me of 2001, for it was during the UNC polls of that year that the party, and thus Panday’s Government, started to crumble publicly. My architectural trip into 2001 has put me in the precise frame of mind to converse with the person I am seeking- Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj — on the first floor of this unimpressive structure stacked with impressive legal practitioners.
To be truthful, I have nagged him for this audience, not only because I want to know more details about that historic year, but because Maharaj has been silent for months. I’m curious about what he is up to in the present. The interview takes place in an undecorated office in his wife, Lynette’s, Port-of-Spain chambers. He is not paying rent, he confesses. “Squatting, are you?” I remark. He laughs. Maharaj looks well, relaxed. He has dropped some weight. I find him as careful in his choice of words as usual, but not as anxious to control the direction the interview takes. After nearly ten years of mental battles with such a tireless opponent, I am relieved he’s not going to make me have to push hard for information. “Tell me about the day you were fired,” I ask him, after he reminisces about Team Unity’s 2001 campaign, aim-ed at strengthening the party and making government accountable to it; and at getting the administration to res-pond to the allegations of corruption. He pauses, offers a half-smile and tells me that he was in his Ministry when the call came from the Prime Minister’s office. The PM wanted to see him, he was informed. He cannot recall the date, but remembers it was a Monday morning. At first, his words come haltingly. “When I got the message, I knew and I sensed that the Prime Minister was going to inform me of my dismissal,” he says. “When I went to Whitehall I was told by his Protocol Officer that Mr Panday was having a meeting with the National Security Council.”
It was the confirmation of his imminent banishment; Maharaj was a member of the Council and had not been invited to attend their talks. “I waited for the meeting to end,” he continues. “When it was finished, I greeted everyone outside, the Commissioner of Police, everybody and then I went to see the Prime Minister.” Maharaj’s voice is now livelier, his phrases more fluid, as he recalls the short exchange between him and his former friend, ally and boss, Basdeo Panday. Relations were so distant by then he says, that the man he once greeted as “Bas” or “Chief”, he now had to call “Prime Minister”. Panday invited him to take a seat and said to him, “I have informed the President that your appointment as Attorney General is terminated.” Maharaj remained silent. Panday, he says, continued, “You appreciate that we could not go on as we were going. I hope there will be no acrimony.” I ask Maharaj if he replied at all. “I told him there would be no acrimony,” he tells me, “but that I agreed we could not go on because I said that we had started on one road and he had gone onto another and that any time he was prepared to come back, he could contact me.” I want to know how he, a man who had just been handed his walking papers, could have had the nerve to invite the Prime Minister back into his own party. He laughs and says, “I shook his hand, thanked him calmly for the opportunity to serve the country and I said I hoped that he would not mind if I passed in the Ministry to collect some of my personal belongings.”
Rift marked downfall of UNC
Panday replied that he certainly did not object. Maharaj returned to his office to say farewell to his staff and to pack. He confesses though, that as he collected his things, he felt sad that a Government with so much promise could not do what its leader in Opposition had pledged it would, fight for people and against corruption in government. But he had no regrets about his stand on corruption, even though the first act of his UNC successor, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, would be to launch an investigation into his (Maharaj’s) hiring of forensic expert, Bob Lindquist, to probe allegations of mass wrongdoing at Piarco. Fraud Squad officers would visit Maharaj. Six months later he was cleared by the Director of Public Prosecutions. “2001 is a year I do not want to relive,” he tells me. I ask the question that was posed him ad nauseum back then, “Did you not want power and when you could not get it, caused the government to collapse?” He will not concede that his behaviour had anything to do with Panday’s refusal to anoint him successor.
What he insists is that he only contested the deputy leadership to fight corruption and force party reform. When blocked by Panday, both at party and at Cabinet level, he was not prepared to sit in the parliament backbenches and act as a rubber stamp for actions he believed inimical to the country’s interests. He blames what happened to the UNC squarely on its financiers. I ask if he is today unwilling to publicly criticise his former leader to avoid alienating Panday’s supporters. His reply is: “It seems that when Mr Panday is not with his financiers, he’s a different person. After 18-18, we met, and he had the right prescription. He admitted reform was necessary, but he did not have the will power to carry it out.” I can sense that Maharaj is now getting restless talking about the past, so I shift to the present and the future. To the UNC’s performance in Opposition, the PNM’s in Government; to critical issues such as housing, crime and poverty. To Team Unity. He is blunt about Mr Panday as UNC and Opposition Leader. “I think that Mr Panday must recognise, as he used to say, that a leader must know when to leave. He seems to have lost the fire.”
His opinion of the UNC’s performance in Opposition is no more complimentary. “There is no strategic planning,” he says. “In every debate, the Opposition must show that the Government is a failure and that the Opposition is the alternative. Furthermore, if the Opposition has no moral authority, no matter how good the contributions are, whatever they say becomes valueless.” Maharaj, who as UNC whip, also planned its parliamentary strategy says his former peers erred with the Anti-kidnapping Bill. They should have attacked it solely on its merits or lack of them, particularly on the bail clause. The Bill, he contends, should not have been tied to peripheral issues, such as constitutional reform. He adds that with such a weak Opposition, the PNM will stay the course easily to the 2007 election. His criticism of Patrick Manning’s PNM is even more stinging, though. “CEPEP is being used for raw political power; the forgiveness of $250 million in the Exxon matter occurred without parliamentary debate or justification; huge pay packets for members of boards; legal contracts given out in the ministries to people belonging to one political party; the housing programme is perceived to be a voter padding exercise in certain marginal constituencies like Tunapuna, San Fernando West and Ortoire/Mayaro.”
Maharaj recalls that when in Opposition, the PNM mantra was “Governance had to change.” “I thought that Mr Manning would have seen that clean government was essential in order to protect the wealth of the people of Trinidad and Tobago,” he says. “The PNM went in to office on certain promises and has betrayed the confidence of the people.” In his opinion, Manning is starting to behave like Panday, “arrogant, not interested in the weaker sections of the population, as if he does not need them”. As for the PM’s million-dollar Red House plans, he points to the unavailability of healthcare and medicine to the poor and the increasing poverty level. On a less serious note, he quips, “Mr Manning really has a special love for the Red House, you know. It’s either religious, superstitious or some other reason.” And he adds with a chuckle: “I do not know if you see when Mr Manning is on that gallery and he waves to the people in Woodford Square, he looks like an Emperor. In a short while he may be seen walking his dog and entering his helicopter.”
Maharaj says that he is preparing to engage the Government in battle over the next few months. His weapon of choice, public law. “There is a new movement in the world among lawyers, who have the passion for socio-economic justice to use the law to get redress for all peoples,” he informs me. Thus, he and a group of lawyers in TT and in England, working pro bono, will fight for the enactment of the Equal Opportunity Act, for squatters, vendors, causal workers, victims of flooding, for everyone. Extra legal costs will come from fund-raising events. Several lay persons will also assist in these legal challenges. As I have suspected, he has also been “doing a lot of work on the ground” and “meeting with interest groups, disenchanted UNC and PNM members and a cross-section of the society”. He says these people want to get involved in politics but with another organisation, and they are waiting for the local government election to end. He willingly admits that Team Unity is not presently prepared to compete with the two major parties, given the numbers or strength of these. Nevertheless, he says Team Unity can be part of the driving force moving toward the formation of a People’s Alliance. This, in turn, he hopes will mature into a new party with a new name, ready to take on the PNM in the next general election, a NAR 2007.
I want to know if he sees himself as the leader of the alliance. “This is not centred around an individual or individuals,” he replies. “This is a movement of people geared toward transforming the political culture.” Then he adds, “Power is a disease. I have seen it transform the brain, the thinking, the personality.” As I retrace my steps to Chacon Street, I think about this thing called power. Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj had given it up and had become the more amiable and reasonable for it. Basdeo Panday had lost it and was still so dazed by the withdrawal that he continued to attack Maharaj. Such attacks in themselves appeared to be an admission that without Maharaj, the UNC seemed rudderless. I stop for one last look at my 2001 strip, only to realise that the very spot on which I am standing is in peril and with it, my memories of political times gone by. I suppose Maharaj is right: power is a disease, which transforms. Now, because the Republic’s Eighth Prime Minister had caught it, not only his brain and personality would be its victims, but so would our capital city.
