Discussion seems to be growing in Trinidad & Tobago about what is perceived as an unwelcome degree of instability in decision-making in Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s People’s Partnership Government. After the PP’s dramatic 29 out of 41 seat dramatic victory at the May 24th polls last year, the Government appears to more than a few commentators to be lacking consistency in its decision-making processes, with the consequence of disputes among Ministers and other officials which the Prime Minister seems to be dilatory in resolving.
The PP’s victory, after then Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s sudden call for general elections in the face of increasing challenges both within and outside of his PNM party, perhaps made the public somewhat forgetful of the speed and suddenness with which the PP coalition assembled itself to fight; and the extent to which there will not have been time to consolidate agreement on key emerging issues in the country, in spite of the admitted attraction of the Party’s Manifesto. Yet, this opposition (to the PNM) coalition-type election instrument has been a recurring phenomenon since Karl Hudson Phillips unsuccessfully sought to put together a winning multi-ethnic coalition with his Organisation for National Reconstruction of 1981; and then ANR Robinson and Basdeo Panday succeeded in achieving victory at the polls in 1986 under the rubric of the National Alliance for Reconstruction.
The failure of the NAR coalition, with the defection of the Panday forces, and then the attempted coup of 1990, in effect delegitimized the Robinson Government, allowing Patrick Manning to reconstruct the PNM machine and win office in 1991. And the break-up of the NAR has haunted opposition efforts of coalition-building since then, as Panday and Manning continued to hold unchallenged sway over their respective parties. Panday’s UNC government was subsequently looked at as failing to fulfill the expectations of the party’s supporters, and other emerging anti-PNM political forces came to virtually see his replacement as a sine qua non of victory. With Kamla Persad’s emergence as Leader, the UNC grouping has once again been able to draw together the traditional anti-PNM forces in new clothes with a welding together of the labour forces led by the former Oilfied Workers Trade Union leader Errol McCleod, now Minister of Labour, and the representative of the business forces Stephen Cadiz, an anti-PNM government protagonist on the crime issue, now Minister of Trade and Industry.
On this occasion, the representative forces of labour in the Cabinet have so far held firm in their allegiance, even under the strain of disapproval by many of their supporters in the trade union movement about what is considered a measly salaries award to public servants. So too has the business sector supporters of the coalition, not entirely happy about the government’s somewhat tardy priming of the pump in the face of recessionary conditions; and its inability to come to terms with widespread dissatisfaction over its inability to satisfactorily deal with the consequences of the CLICO collapse.
At the present time however, it is not disapproval from labour or sectoral forces represented in the government that has still led to a factionalising of it. Rather it is contentions over portfolio responsibilities that seem to have periodically developed, with open disputes emerging among Ministers. The dissatisfaction of Minister of Works and Transport Jack Warner over the handling by the new Board of Caribbean Airlines, of its acquisition of Air Jamaica, has been publicly voiced over and over again. This situation emerged again last week as Minister of Finance Winston Dookeran, in the absence of the Prime Minister in Brazil, intervened to make his own proposals for a dismissal of the Board, reappointment of a new Board and settlement of a definitive policy on the acquisition of Air Jamaica – all this without any consultation with Minister Warner, the line Minister. Minister Warner of course, publicly prides himself as holding a special position in the PP government and party, not only as its chairman, but as one widely credited with consolidating the various forces around Party Leader Persad Bissessar in the pre-election period.
The Prime Minister has herself allowed her own position to be publicly embroiled in issues relating to appointments of public servants to the Security Intelligence Agency, in the course of which the Minister of National Security, former Head of the Army, Brigadier John Sandy, seemed to be visibly at sea as to what was transpiring within the Ministry for which he had formal responsibility. And only last week, a matter not of her, or of her Government’s own making, relating to allegations of impropriety in Caricom’s Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPAC) , headquartered in Trinidad, has fanned new flames about issues relating to regional security arrangements.
In the Prime Minister’s absence in Brazil too, a furore involving her Ministers of Agriculture and Housing, publicly taking opposite sides on the bulldozing of acres of agricultural land by the Housing and Urban Development Corporation claimed by farmers, by way of fact or by way of continual occupation, has found the Prime Minister falling on the side of one Minister, while another continues to support the farmers, mainly of Indian origin.
And then to top it off, an already voluble Minister of Justice, former High Court Judge Herbert Volney has, to the dismay of the local bar, found himself publicly indicating that in his view, “the time has now come for the country to decide whether this present DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) should continue to serve in that capacity” – a statement interpreted by the President of the Law Association as capable of being perceived “as a threat to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and its officers in the event that any decisions made by that Department do not find favour with some members of the Government”.
An emerging sense would seem to be that the Prime Minister, now almost one year in office, has not established a commanding centre of decision-making, either in herself or in a coherent grouping of senior ministers, that can provide a sense of stability in the conduct of the government’s business. Her apparent delay in putting her (or her Cabinet’s) stamp on resolution of the CLICO issue has, for example, allowed a former UNC Attorney General, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, to suggest that the solution put forward by Minister of Finance Dookeran soon after the government assumed office, is “unlawful, unfair and breached constitutional rights to the enjoyment of property”. The Prime Minister seems unable to bridge the differences between Ministers on this issue too.
Much is now expected of the Prime Minister on her return from Brazil. There is an increasing sense that the stasis in decision-making, or the reversal of decisions made, is contributing to a perception of instability in the governance of the country. How she might go about tackling this is not as yet obvious from her year’s performance. Yet, few will have forgotten that it was a persistent instability within the UNC, or the UNC and its allies, which permitted the PNM, under Patrick Manning, and his PNM,to reign supreme from 2001 to last year.
