Dave Ramsaran is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Susquehanna University
By Dave Ramsaran
For the second time in his political career, Patrick Manning, political leader of the People’s National Movement (PNM) of Trinidad and Tobago, has called an early election while serving as Prime Minister. This latest move by Mr Manning seemed very remote up to last December, when he seemed to have firmly in his grasp the new ‘Prime Minister’s Palace’ in St Ann’s. Oh, how quickly political fortunes have changed. Why would the Prime Minster call this election midway into a term in which he has a comfortable 26/15 majority in the House of Representatives? First, there are widespread allegations of corruption. This is made more menacing by the Prime Minster’s personal and public support for Mr Calder Hart, the “Absolute Chairman” of the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT) and by the highly critical report of the Uff Commission, which looked into the operations of UDeCOTT. There is also the Gunapo Heights church construction and the high crime rates, to name a few other reasons. However, calling an election midway into the term, when there is enough time to correct course, is indeed strange. Martin Daily, in the Trinidad Daily Express of Sunday, April 12, suggests that the real reason for the election is more serious than the surface arguments. He argues that business investment has slowed and that the known gas supplies and reserves have been overcommitted. As such, the government would soon be cash strapped, and all its make-work operations and private scholarship funds would have to be scaled back. This seems plausible since the government just attempted to introduce a very unpopular property tax that was defeated in the parliament, to boost its revenue situation. With the fall in revenue, vulnerable sections of the community that are key supporters of the ruling party would face significant hardship. So instead of waiting for the ‘whole house to fall down’ as it were, the PNM may believe they can win before collapse takes place.
While politics in Trinidad and Tobago is always perceived in terms of tribal alliance, some class and gender issues are beginning to emerge, though not yet crystallized to the extent to critically affect the election outcome. The PNM is faced with the prospect of a united opposition as they were in 1986 when they lost the election 33-3 to the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR). The question remains: how likely is the possibility of an effective united opposition crystallizing before the election is called? The first factor that facilitates this unity is the election of Ms Kamla Persad Bissessar as political leader of the United National Congress (UNC). To take control of the party, she had to endure a brutal onslaught from its male patriarchs. Mr Basdeo Panday saw the UNC as his own personal fiefdom and was accustomed to all the maharanees walking behind him. Indeed, Ms Bissessar’s resounding victory has political as well as social implications. In my opinion, it reflects a shift in the social position of Indo-Trinidadian women. More Indo-Trinidadian women are getting higher education, working outside of the home and are slowly whittling away at the traditional Indo-Trinidadian patriarchy. This, however, may be more apparent for middle class Indo-Trinidadian women than for their poor and working class counterparts. The bottom line however is that the election of Ms Bissessar has made it much more likely that there would be unity talks between the UNC and the Congress of the People (COP, led by Winston Dookeran, who led the UNC when Mr Panday was under indictment for not declaring a bank account in England that he said he did not know about and was controlled by his wife).
It may be that Mr Manning has overplayed his hand, but this only becomes reality if there is a united opposition, and there remain significant hurdles to overcome in that regard. First and foremost is the ability of Ms Bissessar to deal with the Panday faction. Most recently, Mr Panday is on record as saying that the UNC has become a party of “elitists.” No successful unity can be attained, and therefore no political gains can be made, if the Panday faction is allowed to remain and make “janjat” within the UNC. Mr Manning has provided Ms Bissessar with a golden opportunity to nominate new faces in the constituencies held by Mr Panday, his brother, his daughter, and other key players in the Panday faction, Misters Maharaj, Ramnath, and Rafeeq. On the other hand there are some leaders in the COP who have taken a ‘holier than thou’ attitude with some sections of the UNC, displaying some rather classist orientations to a party whose foundation and core support remains essentially rural. The last thing the COP wants is a return to the perception that it is a party for ‘knife and fork’ Indo-Trinidadians.
Another critical question that this united opposition needs to address is the extent to which they have learnt from the mistakes of the NAR with respect to governance issues. Moreover they need to articulate the mechanism that would prevent the splintering tendencies of coalition election arrangements.
Another issue that needs to be addressed is what exactly the opposition parties are offering vis-à-vis the PNM. Is it simply exchange? If this is the case the population is best served by the PNM. It may be that what the united opposition is going to offer is a more efficient running of the present system, minus the corruption. This is what the NAR offered in 1986.
This however begs a more fundamental question: given the present crisis of the neoliberal model of development which Trinidad and Tobago has bought into, how far would better management of the present model go with respect to really transforming the lives of the less fortunate in the country? In my opinion better management can only take us so far, since there are some systemic problems with respect to how the economy and polity are organized and operated that the efficiency approach would not address. The bottom line is this: can any of the political parties offer an alternative conception of how to align social forces within the society in order to fundamentally transform the society into a humane one? Given the dominance of the neoliberal paradigm, the absence of an alternative discourse on human development and the relatively weak position of civil society groups that voice concerns about such issues, I have my doubts that any such discussion would take place.
Efficiency can only get you so far, and the fundamental problems that confront post-colonial societies like Trinidad and Tobago cannot be addressed without some new thinking on how best to organize the economy, the polity and civil society to ensure that all its citizens live humane lives. So the PNM may lose the election, but will anything change? Given the tea leaves, I guess calypsonian Brother Valentino can safely keep singing, “Trinidad is nice, Trinidad is a paradise, Trinidad is nice for men like Sabga, Kirpalani and Mr Y de Lima.”
(This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
