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Thinking from the inside out
January 10, 2001
By Denis Solomon
IN HIS address to the nation last Friday the President referred to the population's ignorance of the principles on which our Constitution is based. His deduction from this observation, namely that study of these principles in schools would perhaps have lowered the crime level, is dubious. I would put my faith in more concrete measures, such as jobs and birth control.
However, I think the premise is absolutely correct. The public at large is ignorant, not only of the lofty principles in the Preamble to the Constitution, to which the President was referring, but also of the nuts and bolts of it.
During a news broadcast on the present crisis, a TV6 newsreader repeatedly referred to the President's refusal to appoint seven defeated election candidates "to the government and the Cabinet". She thereby revealed a confusion prevalent in the minds of citizens of this country, who believe that Parliament and government are the same thing. This is both a cause and an effect of our authoritarian colonial mentality. We have difficulty in conceiving that our rulers should not have automatic control of everything once they are elected, or that they should be continually subject to the people's will as expressed by MPs who are representatives of the people first and of their party only secondarily. Conversely, the fact that Parliament is merely a rubber stamp for the majority (which in turn does the leader's bidding unquestioningly) means that the public has no example before its eyes to refute the misconception.
In these columns I have pointed out some of the numerous examples of total misunderstanding of the Constitution that appear in the Ministry of Education Schools Broadcasting Unit's social studies programmes. In one of them this very confusion of government with Parliament appeared. Pupils were told that in 1966 "the House of Representatives is increased from 32 to 36 elected members of government" (my italics).
Outside the Red House entrance on Knox Street there used to be a sign saying "parking is reserved for members of the Senate and House of Representative (sic)" (one House of Representative, two House of Representatives?). In an attempt to draw the attention of the Paliament administration Department to this disgrace, I walked in to a series of offices and asked the first person I met in each "What is the name of the lower house of our Parliament?" Not a single person understood the question, far less answered it.
I don't think the present crisis will have the effect of doing what the President hoped the education system might do, i.e. educate people directly about the meaning of democracy. Trinidadians and Tobagonians have been habituated by religion and bad schooling to accept abstract terms as having no reference to reality. But it may force us to look at the purely practical and institutional side of things – after all, the dispute is at bottom a dispute about arithmetic. With any luck, thinking about it will help us to see the inadequacy of Constitutional provisions that at first glance have nothing to do with the immediate problem. By this process we may be able to work outward from the reality to the principles it should objectify, rather than inwards from the principles to the reality, as the President would have us do.
One concrete element in the situation is the question of the presiding officers of the House of Representatives and the Senate. An article in last Monday's Express quotes former Speaker Nizam Mohammed as referring to the "spectacle" of the Speaker (Rupert Griffith) being elected "under circumstances that may not be conducive to the smooth running of the lower House".
First of all, the Speaker is not Rupert Griffith (there is no House of Representatives and no Speaker). By this form of words, the writer of the article betrays acquiescence in the government's absolute power to name the Speaker. So does Mr Mohammed, but in a much more serious way. He sees Griffith's election as being deleterious to the smooth running of the House only because of the "circumstances" in which it might take place. The questions one hopes the public might ask are, one, how are the present circumstances different from the normal conditions under which a Speaker is elected; and, two, does the House run smoothly at the best of times?
The facts are that even if the President had not put a block on the appointment of the seven "losers", Griffith's appointment as Speaker would have been opposed by the PNM just as strenuously, and just as futilely. The election of Robinson as President of the Republic is an example. The real question therefore is why the House cannot elect a Speaker from among its own members without party political acrimony, and why it became necessary for a Speaker to be electable from outside the House.
Secondly, the House has never run smoothly, and the lack of smoothness is attributable in part to lack of respect of the Members for the Speaker, whether he or she is elected unanimously or not. The frequent clashes between Ken Valley or Hedwidge Bereaux and Hector McClean are examples of this, and the epitome of it was Patrick Manning's declaration of a State of Emergency to get rid of Occah Seapaul. But even without problems between the Speaker and the members, the proceedings of the House are characterised by a lack of "smoothness" that no Speaker could cure. Debates are nothing but slanging matches, and the reason is to be found in the same conditions that make the Speaker's election a mockery: the absolute control of a small House by a government, and the lack of real party politics in the country as a whole.
The crisis also calls attention to the question of the Presidency of the Senate, but in a different way. The newspapers are saying that if the seven "losers" are not appointed, the government will have a minority in the Senate and Ganace Ramdial cannot become President. The answer to this is "so what?" In theory, the Senate elects one of its number President. But the noxious built-in government majority has meant that so far the government has been able to announce in advance who the President will be. If the Senate is convened for the first time without a Government majority, there is nothing whatever to stop someone else from being elected, and the election will be on a fairer basis. Then people may begin to ask themselves why that couldn't have happened all the time. The contemplation of hard arithmetical facts may just lead them to realise that a Senate where the election of the President is under the absolute control of the administration is a travesty of what a Senate is supposed to be. The question "What is democracy" may then find answers anchored in reality.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon