A Million Mutinies Now

Trinidad goes to the polls tomorrow.  (Yeah, yeah, Tobago too.  Nobody who isn’t either from Tobago or employed by a multilateral lending institution could care less.)

The constitution has turned out to be an unexpected campaign issue.  The preamble, pictured above, is not the issue.  Rather, the issue is about the rest of the constitution — should Trinidad become more American, or stay British?  The government wants to adopt an elected executive presidency; the opposition accuses the government of trying to establish a dictatorship.  Ironically, the push for a U.S.-style presidency — and the American example is the one bandied about — came from groups worried that the current Westminster system gave the Prime Minister and ruling party too much power.  I won’t say whether events in the United Kingdom had anything to do with that conclusion in the (probably forelorn) hope of attracting commentary from our British readers. 

There wasn’t much evidence that the government took reform seriously — about all you could hear about the topic was from a goo-goo group at the University of the West Indies and two draft constitutions posted here.  But one of the opposition parties knew a good issue when it saw it.  One day, nothing, the next, accusations of “secret drafts” and cries of “dictatorship!” Much more fun than boring debates about the management of the Heritage and Stabilization Fund, or which highways should be widened, or whether it is better to hire lots more cops or lots and lots more cops. 

The irony, of course, is that by declaring that they’re against it, the opposition has made it more likely that it’ll happen.  Now if Patrick Manning wins the election he will — assuming his party gets enough votes — have a popular mandate to reform the country’s charter, something he never planned on until the opposition figured that it had an issue. 

The battle is between three parties:  the People’s National Movement (PNM), the opposition United National Congress (UNC), and the upstart Congress of the People (COP).  The big issue is crime, with taxes and constitutional reform coming up behind. 

Who are these parties?  Well, there’s the ruling PNM, created by Eric Williams in 1955.  Williams gathered a following based on a series of wildly-popular lectures he gave in downtown Port-of-Spain’s Woodford Square; his party united middle-class Afro-Trinidadians with the union movement.  Williams didn’t intend for the PNM to become the Afro-Trinidadian party, but considering as it was a group of Indo-Trinidadian politicians that he knocked out of power, that’s effectively what it became.  The PNM managed to survive the 1970 riots and strikes known as the Black Power Movement, and held on to power until 1986, by which point Eric Williams was five years dead. 

The Indo-Trinidadians, however, have had some trouble getting their act together.  Maybe not a million mutinies, but at least nine since 1956 — and that’s being conservative.  The first Indo-Trinidadian party, the Democratic Labour Party, suffered from continual internal splits.  It finally committed suicide by boycotting the 1971 election. 

Democratic Labour split into the Organisation for National Reconstruction (ONR) and the United Labour Front (ULF).  In 1981 the two managed to collectively win 37 percent of the vote — but because T&T uses first-past-the-post, the ONR managed to translate a 22% vote share into precisely zero seats.  (The ULF picked up 22% of the seats with only 15% of the votes.)  Realizing the problem, the two parties united as the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) and won the 1986 election — helped by the fact that the economy was in free-fall by then, and it was clear to all that the PNM had clearly frittered away the fruits of the oil boom. 

You’d think that would be that, but the NAR government’s decision to pardon the organizers of the 1990 attempted putsch caused the Caucus for Love, Unity and Brotherhood to bolt the ruling party.  The CLUB renamed itself the United National Congress — I have expressed before and will again my admiration for the political brilliance of that name — and won the 1995 election. 

The new Prime Minister, Basdeo Panday, was many things, but a uniter was not one of them (I’m not sure he was all that much of a deciderer either) and widespread corruption caused the attorney-general to walk out of the party and  contest the next election under the Team Unity banner.  (I won’t.  I want to make the joke, but I won’t.  It’s too obvious.)  Team Unity won only 3% of the vote in the 2001 election, but that was enough to produce a hung parliament.  And so the PNM shimmied back into power in the 2002 election, just in time to enjoy the fruits of the second oil boom—which they do not, I must say, appear to be frittering away this time. 

You’d think that the Team Unity experience might have gotten the UNC to hang together, but you’d be underestimating Mr. Panday’s stubborness — and legal troubles.  Despite a series of corruption indictments, in Port-of-Spain and in London, Panday stuck with his party ... and that led William Dookeran (the former central bank head) to join the Team Unity mutineers and form the Congress of the People, which has tried to position itself as a cross-racial middle-class party. 

Except, of course, Team Unity’s leader, Ramesh Maharaj, has now decided to reunite with the UNC under Mr. Panday.  Why his corruption now is less intolerable than his corruption then is not clear to me.  You gotta love it.

So you’ve got a three-way election between the PNM, the UNC, and the COP.  There aren’t a whole lot of substantive differences between the parties.  The PNM’s platform is, basically, “Don’t mess with success.  Plus, we made higher education free.”  The UNC, conversely, is running under, “We made mistakes, but you really can’t trust the black people, and crime!”  The COP’s platform, meanwhile, seems to be, “In your heart, you know they both suck.” 

The COP would probably fritter away more oil revenues in other tax cuts (except for gasoline) while the PNM would build more stuff — Flyovers!  Railroads! Houses! — and the UNC would hire a lot of cops.  “The government is in league with the criminals,” says Panday, with ... ah ... not a whole lot of evidence to back that up.

Me, I suspect I’d vote for the PNM ... but that may be because pretty much everyone in Amma’s family intends to vote for the PNM.   

There’s been some violence—especially against COP candidates, one of whom was badly beaten in Laventille.  (“What was he doing in Laventille?” asks Amma.  “Uh, that was the constituency he was running in, baby,” I respond.  “I repeat,” says Amma, “What was he doing in Laventille?”)  There have also been some accusations of fraud, none of which are serious by American standards, but which the PNM government has taken seriously enough to invite in a 27-person Caricom observer team.  Caricom observation, in fact, seems to be becoming standard in the West Indies formerly known as British (plus Suriname), which underscores Doug Muir’s point that anyone who believes that international relations are anarchical is an idiot. 

I predict that the PNM will win Monday’s election.  While Trinidad’s poor performance in Transparency International’s corruption survey has become an issue, the government has done a pretty decent job of managing the oil boom and setting the country up for the post-petrochem future.  (Assuming, that is, that the Bolivarian Republic doesn’t make such a botch of things that there is no Venezuelan gas for Trinidad to use.)  Crime is a problem — watch this space — but the opposition has been pretty short on magic bullets, and the government has gained credit by making solid headway against the one violent crime that it’s actually fairly easy for an even quarterway competent government to fight:  kidnapping for ransom.    Finally, free higher education will get you a lot of middle-class votes who might have otherwise gone the other way.  Combine that play for the “agency brown” constituency with the PNM machine’s lock on poor Afro-Trinidadian votes and the UNC-COP split for Indo-Trinidadian ones, and you’ve got the potential for a landslide. 

The real problem is that a PNM victory, as mentioned above, will have the side-effect of making constitutional reform far more likely.  Trinidad gained independence under a 1961 Order-in-Council intended to give the “territory” self-government under the West Indies Federation.  Other than a few cosmetic changes in 1962 — changing “premier” to “prime minister” and the like — Trinidad remained under the 1961 order until 1976. 

The 1976 constitution replaced the Governor-General with an elected president, and created a wide range of executive officers independent of the Prime Minister.  The reason was the Black Power Revolution.  In the wake of the events of 1970, there was a widespread feeling that the executive’s power needed to be curbed.  A 1974 committee recommended that a President elected by a two-thirds majority of an electoral college consisting of Parliament and all local government councillors sitting together and voting by secret ballot replace the Governor-General.  The idea was that the President would both select the Prime Minister and appoint the heads of various independent organs, in order to reduce the prime minister’s overwhelming authority.  (Cutting ties with the Queen was a side-effect, but not the cause of the change.) 

It says something about Eric Williams, I think, that he pushed through reforms that limited his own powers.  Now, not all of them — the 1976 constitution created a presidency elected by a majority of both houses of parliament, not a separate electoral college.  And the new presidency proved to be more partisan than intended:  frex, the PNM president appointed a PNM government after the 2001 hung parliament.  But the new constitution successfully weakened the Trinidadian prime minister by quite a bit compared to his or her British counterpart without paralyzing the government.  (Lib Dems, y’all might wanna take a look at the Trini constitution, I think.) 

But now there’s the executive president proposal.  Two drafts are in circulation.  To be fair, I prefer Trinidad’s current system to a more American-style one.  (Canadian readers, feel free to express smug satisfaction, but note that we here in the great United States have better weather, better roads, and better hockey players.  Plus, your flag looks like a badly-designed corporate logo.  So go take your health care and your sane politics and your lower crime and all that and ... express smug satisfaction.)  That noted, the two drafts differ on whether the executive president would be elected by popular vote or by the parliament, and the government seems to favor the latter.  So regardless of your opinion about a fixed-term executive president, the idea of an executive president elected by the parliament seems like a disaster all around, the worst of all worlds, and I hope that it doesn’t come to that. 

In other words, the PNM deserves to win — but not by too much.

Comments

[David Weman]

You crazy, the Canadian flag looks great.

[Carlos]

Dude, the Canadian flag is a *well* designed corporate logo. It's distinctive and iconic and inoffensive, with a Q score through the roof.

We all know which flag looks like it was designed by a committee. It doesn't matter: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05172006

[Dennis Brennan]

Dude:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Detroit_flag.png

It could be worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Grenville_Diptych_edit2.jpg

[Carlos]

Yikes. That isn't a flag, it's a game of Concentration. And I thought the Maryland state flag was a little busy.

Toynbee tiles?

[Noel Maurer]

There's an election on, y'all! A vitally-important Earth-shatttering election.

Or not. But still.

[Dennis Brennan]

Toynbee tiles. It's a Philly thing (mostly), you wouldn't understand. Not that I understand either.

What can I say... to paraphrase something that you once wrote, Wikipedia is my Minesweeper.

I think we're starting to annoy Noel by not commenting on the actual substance of his post. (Noel, whatever you write about, by all means continue to illustrate it with pictures of the future Mrs. Noel.)

[Noel Maurer]

Dennis, first part: yes. Jeez. Nobody has like nothin' to say? No analogies with other countries? No excursions into imperial history? No commentaries about candidate-beating? Nada? Nothing?

More specifically: nothing to entertain /me/?

That means you, ostensible blog-owner guy, always with the interesting stuff followed by "but I'll be back manana with like even more interesting stuff, for real." Not that pomengran ... pome ... however you spell 'em aren't interesting. Too interesting --- I but did ruin some very nice clothes on a trip to Saudi with those bloody things.

Phooey. Not that I'll stop, but still, phooey.

Dennis, second part: yes! Of course. Ain't she beautiful? I am, as always, and to my surprise, stunned.

Bought the wedding rings today.

[James Bodi]

Re the flag - I'll ignore the bait and swallow my nationalism. You must admit that at least we left out the ubiquitous blue.

Beating of candidates is pretty bad, wherever they were. Bermuda's just kicked off its election, and while the Premier is invectivating all over the place, no-one is throwing punches or rocks. The Premier is, however, trying to gag the media over some stolen police files which he says are defamatory. Why he chose to go to the polls just after the Privy Council turned his press ban down, is a bit of a mystery.

I second Dennis on the future Mrs. Noel.

[Noel Maurer]

James: I guess it would depend on whether the Premier thinks that his attempt to gag the press will cost him votes. Will it?

Candidate-beating is bad; Amma's (having spent much of her youth in next-door Belmont) first reaction was just that any opposition candidate who tried to campaign in Laventille had to understand the risks --- it's a neighborhood where people have been assaulted just for wearing UNC T-shirts.

[James Bodi]

It's hard to tell. Attempting to gag will cost some votes, I think, and failing some more, but it's really the odd timing I wonder about. See, the press has been gagged the whole summer while the case went up through the courts to the PC. Nobody was paying attention then. People were expecting a summer election anyway, so he could have gone then and had the campaign well over before the ruling. Alternately he could have waited, let the files be printed and the fuss to die down. Now they'll come out during an election.

Btw, I agree with you on the dangers of an over-powerful prime minister, but I'm very attached to the Westminster model. Seems to me the answer is MPs with more guts but it may be the times have changed too much for that to work anymore.